DOJ and Longhorn....

I would have expected some spin from a story about the DOJ and MS on MSNBC but this is a bit more than I expecded.

Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said the company expects Longhorn to be released while the settlement is still in force, and that Microsoft will adhere to the agreement in designing the new system regardless of when it comes out.

"All development is being done with full consideration for our obligations and commitments" under the agreement, she said.

Priceless is on the old XMMS and it couldn't be more apropos. You see, XAML isn't a web browser technology. IE will still be there and be able to be hidden, but anything you wish to do with the "new and approved" internet will be done through Avalon apps talking to friendly .Net servers. SOAP should be expected to be slower on Longhorn, as should XML-RPC.

So thw Web Browser is no longer an issue. Anything can be coded around, even the DOJ.

Although the courts found that commingling of the browser code with the operating system was anti-competitive, the deal with the Justice Department stopped short of forcing the company to decouple the programs.

And now that they are redefining "browser" to be something else all together, the comingling will only get worse. The DOJ should have forced them to remove browser code from the OS. They would be in less shit if they had. But the DOJ decided to give them a pass on actually doing the right thing and allowed the anticompetetive behavior to continue.