You should read what Barnes and Noble presented to the ITC. It’s a powerful and thorough expose on the pattern of abuse of competition laws by M$ including now a campaign of unfair shakedown over patents.

“Microsoft’s primary copyright argument borders on the frivolous. The company claims an absolute and unfettered right to use its intellectual property as it wishes.
… That is no more correct than the proposition that use of ones’ personal property, such as a baseball bat, cannot give rise to tort liability. As the Federal Circuit succinctly stated: ‘Intellectual property rights do not confer a privilege to violate the antitrust laws’”

It’s a great read. Find it at Groklaw and an article about the M$ v B&N case.

It’s almost as Martin Niemöller said,
“First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

M$ has picked off one business after another signing them up to NDAs and royalty payments as if M$ owned Android/Linux. Barnes and Noble is asking the ITC to do the right thing and stomp out M$’s abuse before it’s too late. Barns and Noble apparently sees that someone has to fight back and they are not passing the buck. M$ has already cowed a bunch of OEMs who did not fight back.

Good for B&N.

What’s absolutely amazing to me is that

• either M$ is deluded in thinking that M$ can escape the antitrust laws or
• M$ is right and the world will stupidly allow the monopoly to continue indefinitely.

The monopoly should have been dismembered a decade ago but the court messed up. Let’s hope the ITC gets it right this time. At some point they should realize that M$ is a chronic criminal who invests $billions in figuring out new ways to mess with the competition rather than working for a living.

Digitimes have the estimate for 2011 and the forecast for 2012 and beyond. Shipments of notebooks were growing at more than 20% per annum recently but the estimate is just a few percent growth in 2011 and beyond while tablets will grow 60% over the next year (before that other OS is expected).

The forecast for 2012 is 95 million tablets to be shipped. Digitimes estimates growth of tablets from 2010 to 2011 will be 188% and from 2011 to 2012 will be 59%. There is a lot of uncertainty about when that other OS will ship on tablets, but it looks to be an unsubstantial part of the forecast. OTOH Android/Linux will finally arrive on tablets as things are going.

Smart phones, too, are expected to continue growth of shipments to a staggering billion per year within a few years. The forecast is for tablets to nearly overtake notebooks after 2014. I would not bank on that but M$’s dream of continued monopoly must certainly be clouded.

If the numbers are anywhere close to reality, we have reached the tipping point where enough OEMs are shipping GNU/Linux or Android/Linux to make a difference. Growth in x86 PCs of all kinds will max out in 2011 and have nowhere to go but down. This will be helped by a shortage of hard drives. With shipments of x86 will fall the Wintel monopoly. In another article, Digitimes reports: “Since ARM is cooperating with Microsoft, and Intel with Google, multiple choices of platform will mean a single platform will no longer dominate the market, and competition will also force the upstream giants to provide a wider range of options to their downstream partners.” Translated into my language, there will be choice on retail shelves by 2012. Watch the consumers slurp up small cheap computers running Free Software.

Expect more lawsuits as M$ fights the turning tide. Expect the world to kick out software patents as the courts and global industry become clogged with the rotting remnants of the dinosaur. The world of IT will be a very different place in three years.