Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman at Robert Pogson

Several sites have mentioned the suit against M$ by Emma Alvarado for illegal use of monopoly power. Here is one with a pictureat The Inquirer. She sure looks determined. Good for her! If I were M$, I would apologise immediately and see that everyone gets a refund for Vista who paid anything for it in the last two years. Nothing less will begin to repair the damage they have done to themselves with Vista.

Seriously. I have been married 25 years to a determined woman and I know you should not mess with one. In the 200 million or so copies of Vista sold there are probably enough to whip up a real class-action suit. M$ has no good legs to stand on. Everything it does is designed to leverage monopoly power and to maintain it. No proper business sells a new model and charges extra for the old model and insists one buy the new model to get the old model. That would take a jury about 5s to decide was abuse of the market. What were they thinking? That the US DOJ was tamed? Impatient for the governments to reign in this bully, ordinary folks are fighting back. Millions are using GNU/Linux. Others are suing the bastards. It is all good.

Links:

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

3 Responses to “Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman”

Feed for this Entry

1 Thomas Ruth Feb 28th, 2009 at 9:43 am

Seriously Mr Pogson, this suit is ridicules. For one Microsoft isn’t charging extra for the downgrade the OEM is. Further more $59 is a bargain, because it takes time to ‘downgrade’ which in this case is a bit of a misnomer. Since this is actually wiping the drive and freshly installing XP/Drivers/Software etc. I get about $89 to do the same thing. Heck you even know how much more Dell charges for a laptop featuring Ubuntu over one featuring Windows.

Oh and there are plenty of times when an older version of something costs more.
2 Robert Pogson Feb 28th, 2009 at 11:49 am

M$ is charging extra for the down-grade, the Vista-whatever licence fee. You should not have to buy one product to get another if they are not dependent on each other. It costs the OEM nothing extra to install XP instead of Vista so they are party to the ripoff. Buyers who were forced to do this will remember this a long time whatever the results of the suit. The purpose of the suit is to make M$ and its partners remember the customer should get what the customer wants.
3 radu Mar 5th, 2009 at 4:54 am

Will Microsoft provide the medium (for free or at cost price) and grant a licence for the installation of Windows XP on a PC with Vista OEM? I thought so…