[Info-vax] Itanium and the NY antitrust suit against Intel

[Neil Rieck]

On Nov 29, 7:19 am, Neil Rieck <n.ri... at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> On Nov 24, 6:26 pm, mathog <dmat... at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
> > There are a couple of juicy tidbits in this article
>
> >http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2355462,00.asp
>
> > about the NY antitrust suit against Intel.  Of course, most of the
> > article is about x86 competition, or the lack thereof.
> > It was an oddly fascinating and yet disgusting read.  Sort of like an
> > insightful review on the the mating habits of cannibalistic insects.
>
> > Regards,
>
> > David Mathog
>
> In the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years there was a commonly held belief by
> all citizens (in all western countries) that government should get out
> of the way of business. The results of this philosophy go horribly
> wrong when Microsoft effectively killed Netscape. In the article you
> provided it looks like Intel was up to the same shenanigans as
> Microsoft in the previous decade.
>
> I am not advocating "big government". I am only saying there is
> nothing wrong with "some" government controls and oversight (think
> speed limits and stop lights on public roads). Obviously unbridled
> capitalism can lead to unintended consequences. For example, after
> Microsoft won the browser wars in the middle-to-late 1990s, they did
> virtually nothing to advance the state of browser technology.
> (Microsoft was now fixated on SUN so were copying Java into C# and
> JavaScript into J++). It was Mozilla (with Firefox) and Google (adding
> AJAX to their already popular search engine, etc.) that breathed new
> life into a sleeping Microsoft.
>
> I get the feeling that these big companies miss this point: "if all
> their competition was removed then the resulting industry would end up
> stagnating like anything we have seen in ex-communist East Europe or
> the now defunct USSR.
>
> NSR

Sorry for the second post but I forgot to add something about Itanium.
I don't want to get into conspiracy theories but the Extremetech
article makes me wonder what kind of backroom deals were made between
Intel and Compaq-HP to kill Alpha and PA-RISC. Remember that HP
engineers didn't want to kill PA-RISC because of competition from
other processors, including Alpha. Then in 2001 while Compaq was in
merger talks with HP, Compaq kills Alpha and transfers ~ 300 engineers
to Intel. After the HP-Compaq merger, HP followed through with killing
off PA-RISC.

It is possible (although unproven) that Intel dropped the price of x86
technology sold to HPQ for a number of years in exchange for the death
of Alpha and PA-RISC (spending technological capital, as it were).
Maybe Dell's problems were related to HPQ getting x86 components at a
price much lower than HPQ.

NSR