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Exactly! I've been wondering the same thing. How is this not an obvious abuse of their monopoly? They force FAT on all device makers and then collect royalties. Without their desktop monopoly different, patent-free and simply better filesystems could be implemented.
Why is there no anti-trust investigation into this behaviour?
Edited 2012-07-29 22:42 UTC
Why do you want to investigate flash manufacturers? Because it's their action (or inaction) that is responsible for the situation...
...they do not come up with some filesystem of their own (drivers semi-automatically installed, at first connection, from a very small partition on the flash pretending to be a CD-ROM, for example - to avoid any usage of FAT). Microsoft doesn't force FAT on anybody who really doesn't want it (and BTW, none of the flash drives connected right now to my Windows PC are FAT-formatted)
Windows supports other file systems perfectly well, Microsoft does nothing to prevent that - you install a driver, and voilĂ . Manufacturers of flash memory aren't obliged to anything, they are free to come up with some standard of theirs.





Member since:
2012-06-14
I thought Microsoft could not use their monopoly position on the desktop market to get an advantage in another market (patent extortion). They still have a desktop monopoly and because of their refusal to support other file systems, manufacturers of Flash memory are obliged to put FAT file systems on SD-cards, and memory sticks.