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Opening Statements Begin in Microsoft - Iowa Case
cc writes "The Des Moines Register is reporting that opening statements have begun in the Microsoft-Iowa antitrust case. The Register reports that the Plaintiffs have shaped their case around nine stories involving competitors from IBM to Linux. Microsoft attorneys say Gates is expected to testify in January, and company CEO Steve Ballmer will likely appear in February. Both men are expected to be on the stand for about four days. Unlike previous antitrust cases against the software giant, the Iowa case is seeking additional damages for security vulnerabilities. Plaintiffs allege that Microsoft's bundling of IE with Windows caused harm to consumers by increasing the consumer's susceptibility to security breaches and bugs. The case is one of the largest antitrust cases in history, encompassing millions of documents and Microsoft's business practices during the last 20 years."
All OSes have a web browser. How can Microsoft be punished for something everyone does? Not to mention the fact that Windows is the most secure OS out there. No other OS has been tested so much.
Apple does the same thing with Safari. Or does that not count?
No. Because if there is one thing the "geeks" of Slashdot have demonstrated time and time again, it is that they do not understand the software engineering behind "IE" and the way it is the same as the equivalents on other platforms (Safari/WebCore in OS X, khtml in KDE, whatever-it-is in GNOME).
Therefore, the fact that every platform has since gone down the same path Microsoft did with IE, doesn't make them the same because anything Microsoft does is bad, but anything !Microsoft does is ok.
Please mod parent down.
... Are you referring to an office suite for Mac? Or maybe games such as Halo. That's the only area where MS could directly compete. However, there are a number of alternatives to word and excel available on the Mac. You know you should really be complaining about apple killing off your choice of software providers. Every time Apple chooses to roll in a new feature to their OS they kill off an entire development segment. Take for example the widgets from dashboard, originally implemented on the Mac by Konfabulator now a yahoo company. Apple claims that the implementation is different, however the product is effectively the same. A once paid for product is now free.
"Every time I check my email, I am flooded with spam from compromised Windows zombies. Every time I try to purchase new MacOS X software, I am limited in my selection due to Windows monopolization driving competing developers out of business. I could go on and on."
A) If they were not windows zombies, they would be some other platforms zombies. There is of course no way to prove this, but every month vulnerabilities are discovered in every operating system in use. It takes a lazy or ill informed end user to provide a hole to exploit by not patching. There are many, many people out there that fall into this category.
B) "I am limited in my selection"
C) Bill Gates AND Microsoft are both far more of philanthropists than Apple, or Jobs can ever hope to be. What was the last significant charitable gift from apple to the world? Jobs? http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70072-0.html
Point C I find most aggravating. Hundreds of Millions of dollars are being re-invested in the world to fight important issues that for the large part the developed world doesn't give a crap about. Give credit where credit is due.
You have a pretty warped sense of history. Microsoft supported IE on Mac until last year. Safari has been the default browser on OSX for years. This "Oh waaaaaaahhhh.. microsoft dropped support for IE so apple had to create it's own browser" argument is fictitious. Apple created their own browser years before.
Also, I don't recall Microsoft ever saying, anywhere, that tying IE to the shell was necessary. In fact, in Vista, they've removed this tie. Being integrated in the shell had little to do with removing IE. The problem was that all kinds of stuff in the OS and in third party apps would break if you did, because apps had been written to assume that the rendering libraries were a part of the OS and would be available. Microsoft's position was that they didn't consider the OS usable if these things were broken, thus removing IE made the OS unusable, a position the judge agreed with when Microsoft removed IE and proved it's point.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
You miss the point - and I'm guessing deliberately. The important thing is that removing it doesn't affect the O/S. Removing KHTML doesn't affect the O/S. Removing MSHTML (assuming you could) DOES affect the O/S.
You just totally destroyed your own argument with that one statement. The keyword here is APPS. It may break APPS, but the OPERATING SYSTEM will still work and run fine, thank you very much.
So if I screw up an upgrade to my word processor, my OS is broken? If I accidentally bugger up my installed copy of minesweeper my OS is broken?
That is one of the silliest things I've heard here in a long time - you're just proving that you yourself are one of the geeks you were referring to earlier.
Applications are NOT the OS.
I also find it very interesting that you didn't even address the comments I made regarding the differences between the libraries used for the Linux programmes and how MSHTML is embedded into the OS core on windows.
Maybe you realized that square wheels suck after all.