"I'm going to abandon a market of 499,000,000 to teach them that they can't possibly live without me."
"Great idea, P.C. You have my enthusiastic support."
Posted on 01/17/2009 3:46:50 AM PST by reaganaut1
BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union said Friday that Microsoft’s practice of selling the Internet Explorer browser together with its Windows operating system violated the union’s antitrust rules.
It ordered the software giant to untie the browser from its operating system in the 27-nation union, enabling makers of rival browsers to compete fairly.
“Microsoft’s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between Web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice,” the E.U. said in a statement.
It gave Microsoft eight weeks to respond, adding that the company could defend its position in a hearing if it found that useful.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Here is the response I’d love to see from Microsoft to the EU:
Okay, we will stop selling all Microsoft products to the EU. NO IE. NO Windows. NO Office.
We’re outta here!
The Chronic stupidity of the Euro- this is exactly what caused the recession in 2001, when the AG accused MS of being a monopoly becuse Explorer was a part of the MS OS. Within weeks all venture capital to web commerce start-ups moved to safer investments like real estate and foreign markets.
Imagine what the EU would do if Microsoft simply stopped selling anything in the EU.
“vertical monopolist”
UUUOOOOOWWWW! I like that! Never seen that one before!
Netscape - the company - killed Netscape - the product.
How?!? I run XP, but I also have Opera, Chrome and Firefox, so I can choose which one I want.
Apple didn’t come up with the widget concept - others did.
Not true - Their has never been a time that what you stated was true.
It did? Really?
I never knew Word came bundled with the operating system. And to think I paid good money to purchase Word - because my secretary hated Wordperfect.
How would you like it if you couldn't buy a car and take it home with rims for your tires simply because other rim manufacturers thought it was unfair that GM provided them in the cost of the car? I would support if you wanted to regulate that you can buy a car without rims and be compensated for the savings, but I would not support that you should mandate that rims don't come on the car. I would also support GM charging you special handling fees for trying to move the car around on transporter rims...
Once again, if you do not want to use windows, don't. The EU has the same option.
MS didn't kill off Word Perfect... "Word Perfect for Windows" and Novell killed Word Perfect. Do you really remember Lotus 123? I remember having to install 3 different versions of Lotus on computers, just to allow spreadsheets with embedded macros to continue to work. Granted, Excel isn't much better, but MS really didn't kill Lotus, as much as IBM's purchase of the company hurt it. I know that it's fashionable to label Bill Gates as the Anti-Christ, and Microsoft as "The Great Satan," but try to get a grip. Yes, MS has (in the past, and often continues to do so today) used heavy handed (some will call them predatory) capitalistic tactics to wipe out competitors. And they, like any other company, don't like competition. But let's be realistic: The fall of these other companies wasn't completely Microsoft's doing.
People realized that they wanted integrated applications, where they didn't need to learn an entirely different user interface in order to start using a new application. And people wanted to be able to integrate information from different applications together, like being able to paste live data into their documents. That led to a number of integrated application packages from a lot of companies... For instance, Word Perfect had their package which included "Word Perfect," "Plan Perfect," "Data Perfect," and even "Word Perfect Office" which would eventually become "GroupWise," Novell's messaging system. Lotus had their own integrated system. And different word processors had their own niche markets. For instance, most serious scientific desktop publishers used Aldus Pagemaker on Sun workstations since they often needed a WYSIWYG interface, while those who didn't would often use WordStar. Word Perfect was at home in law offices, and there were a bunch of document management systems that grew up around it. And Microsoft Word (pre-windows) was a solid performer that had a pretty good reputation. Heck, even Informix had an integrated package, but for the life of me, I can't remember the name of it. We're talking back in the days of the Intel 80286 processor.
But Microsoft was the first to really push the idea of a fully integrated desktop user interface, that extended into the applications. There were others, like GEM, but they failed, and NOT because of Microsoft.
Microsoft stole Apple’s technology to develop Windows. Apple only responded in court too late and too little.
MS didn't "steal" technology from Apple (though they did from some other companies, like IBM and Stack Electronics), any more than Apple stole the technology of Xerox's SmallTalk environment from PARC. In both cases, they (Apple and Microsoft) "saw" a better user interface, and built upon it. You're referring to the "look & feel" law suits. But I'll tell you, while Windows "look & feel" was similar to that of Apple's OS, the original Mac and LISA OS looked identical to the Smalltalk interface used by Xerox at PARC. Not "similar," but identical. So by your standards, that would make Apple "more guilty" of "stealing" than Microsoft.
No question about it, Microsoft cheats
Take a chill pill, Dave.
Mark
Netscape had a weird business model. They wanted to make money from their server side, but it was competing against free products, like Apache and IIS.
Mark
"I'm going to abandon a market of 499,000,000 to teach them that they can't possibly live without me."
"Great idea, P.C. You have my enthusiastic support."
I agree. It's sort of like the FTC demanding that automakers not be allowed to install car stereos in new automobiles, because of unfair competition - But then it never seemed to hurt the business of Alpine, Blapunkt, Pioneer, Dennon, Kenwood, etc...
It's more about sour grapes AND the opportunity to throw their weight around against the 800 pound gorilla (Microsoft).
Mark
That's true. They can't "delete" it. You can open up "My Computer" to look at your files, and type an internet address at the top instead.
In an American anti-trust case about this a few years back, a judge ordered MS to delete IE even though MS explained to him what would happen. So they did it, and produced an inoperable computer. The judge got pissed. Lawyers.
And before someone comes along and tells of how Novell was killed off by Microsoft, as a former Novell Master CNE (since 1989) and Master CNI (instructor), I can say without a doubt that Novell killed off Novell's market share. Great technology, but their marketing deparment couldn't figure out how to sell space heaters to eskimos!
My favorite example was when Novell bought UNIX... They actually positioned it AS A COMPETITOR to Novell's NetWare servers!
Mark
There were plenty of home computers before Microsoft. My first commercially-built computer was a CP/M machine -- an O/S that ran on different hardware platforms. CP/M-86 lost out to DOS, though, and that's where Microsoft really got its boost.
Agreed on both points. My Kubuntu system installed with Konquerer already installed -- it's a filesystem explorer / it's a browser. (It may have had Firefox also, don't recall.) Are they going to make Kubuntu unbundle too?
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