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Microsoft's Longhorn Faces Antitrust Scrutiny
benore writes "The Department of Justice
will be reviewing Microsoft's Longhorn product as part of the company's antitrust settlement. One analyst opines that Mircosoft is appearing to soften its image to become kinder and gentler. 'They don't want people to hate them anymore. They've learned from their mistakes.' Hmmm."
One area that DOJ regulators will be looking at, in particular, is a control panel in Longhorn that facilitates use of a browser and media player other than the Microsoft versions that will be pre-built into the system.
Great. We have government "experts" who think the choice of media player really important and they aren't even looking at the whole Trusted Computing initiative and the monopolistic implications thereof.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
For boxed copies of Windows, I agree 100% - it should include anything MS wants to put in the box. For OEM copies it's a different matter. It should include the kernel, basic subsystems, Windows Explorer, and very little else. OEMs could then be free to decide what media player, office suite, browser, etc. they bundle, and customers could then buy from differentiated OEMs. MS should not be allowed to use their effective monopoly in the OS market to create monopolies in other markets (e.g. the web browser market), and this is exactly what the antitrust laws state.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No offence, but this is offtopic; congratulations on getting modded up to +5 for a post that has almost nothing to do with the article. I don't blame yo, but the sheep-like moderators, modding up anything anti-MS and pro-linux.
Two things I sort of take issue with, though:
as well as forced upgrades
What forced upgrades, how? My company is still using Office 2000, and have not been "forced" to upgrade, despite some clients using Office XP; the documents still open just fine. There are still machines running NT 4; similarly, nothing is forcing us to upgrade them. Sure, support is running out/has run out, but the same is true of older releases of Linux distros. Without a leet C hacker or two on staff, businesses using them are similarly "forced" to upgrade if they wish to have continued support.
will be advocating limiting the use of MS products to anyone who will listen
Rather you should be advocating the use of the best tool for the job. If that tool happens to be from MS, then so be it. MS isn't the answer to everything, but then neither is Linux.
It's official. Most of you are morons.