"It's been a good week for Microsoft's documentation efforts as the company achieved important milestones with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. US antitrust authorities signed off on Vista and IE7 and announced that Microsoft was making good progress in its efforts to document certain server protocols in Windows. In Europe, where Microsoft has encountered more problems and increased fines over the state of its documentation, the company got a rare bit of good news as the European Commission completed its initial review of the revised documents."
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Member since:2006-01-06
Think about it, if Microsoft had actually been forced to comply properly with the Internet Explorer anti-trust case (and if the a-t case had reached the right conclusions) and stopped shipping Internet Explorer by default, Firefox would probably have a dominant market share by now.
If that's your opinion, fine. Go with it. But there's no data which suggests that Firefox would be the dominant browser today if Microsoft had stopped shipping IE, by default. In the end, consumers would still have to make a choice, and I'd assert that at least half would stick with the same vendor.
Microsoft is abusing it's Operating System dominance to own the Internet browser, and Media player markets.
Nah. The courts already addressed the web browser issue - stick a fork in it. As for media player, MS has always shipped a media player since Windows 3.0 multimedia edition. Ordering them to uninstall it because some random competitors don't like the idea of MS distributing a free media player is simply dumb.
Actually it's more about the American delusion that they have a free society. (btw. This is not an un-shared view)
So, you're actually of the opinion that ordering MS to uninstall media player made Europe more of a "free society"? Hilarious. And nonsense. It was a solution looking for a problem. A hammer looking for a nail. The fact remains that NO ONE BOUGHT THE EDITION WITHOUT MEDIA PLAYER. The effort was a total failure. Can't you see that?
Member since:2006-06-03
NO ONE BOUGHT THE EDITION WITHOUT MEDIA PLAYER
That's because the ruling was bad IMO (but the best that the EU were allowed to do). The problem of anti-competitiveness is NOT a consumer problem. The issue was raised by Media player companies in a business scenario, the reason that NO ONE BOUGHT THE EDITION WITHOUT MEDIA PLAYER is because the Media companies knew that they would never be able to spend enough money on advertising to enthuse the general public into buying N. Most of the consumers don't care, it's the other companies that do care.
It's a well-known scenario, called apathy, i.e. Voter apathy, consumer apathy etc..
Member since:2006-06-01
Think about it, if Microsoft had actually been forced to comply properly with the Internet Explorer anti-trust case
If Netscape had charged for its browser, instead of stealing it from Mosiac and giving it away for free to put competitors out of business who had licensed the technology from the NCSA, then Netscape would have gone out of business and there would never have been a Firefox.
Spyglass was the properly licensed company allowed to distribute Mosaic technology. They had licensed the technology to something like 22 firms including Microsoft.
Netscape chose to destroy as many of those companies as it could by giving away Netscape.
Edited 2006-11-26 22:22
Member since:2006-06-03
If Netscape had charged for its browser, instead of stealing it from Mosiac and giving it away for free
Except that NCSA was also giving away Mosaic for free, tthe only difference from Netscape Navigator (apart from the code) was that Netscape was more performant and had more features.
There is no proof and not much suggestion that Netscape stole any code from NCSA, and there were other graphical browsers out at the time, so the 'stealing' is down to the fact that Netscape was written by ex NCSA exployees? or because of the successfully settled trademark suit? For which Netscape paid a substantial sum.
allowed to distribute Mosaic technology
They didn't steal the technology, just the name (see above)
Member since:
2006-06-03
Think about it, if Microsoft had actually been forced to comply properly with the Internet Explorer anti-trust case (and if the a-t case had reached the right conclusions) and stopped shipping Internet Explorer by default, Firefox would probably have a dominant market share by now. Microsoft is abusing it's Operating System dominance to own the Internet browser, and Media player markets.
it's all about giving European competitors a leg up against dominant American software companies
Actually it's more about the American delusion that they have a free society. (btw. This is not an un-shared view)