Seven States Extend Microsoft Antitrust Judgment

Technical Writing Geek writes "A number of states have moved to extend antitrust judgments against Microsoft until the year 2012. California, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia are all contributing to the decision, and have released a report on the factors that lead to the extension. 'The report laments the state of OEM web browser bundling, saying that no major OEM currently distributes a browser other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE). This is important due to the rise of new middleware platforms (such as Adobe's AIR and Microsoft's own Silverlight) that can create rich, OS-independent, web-based applications.' The report is slightly self-contradictory, but raises some valid points."

Comments

Re:Oh, come on

[Jester998]

It was relevant to the antitrust case because it generates platform lock-in.

For two perfect examples, you have to look no further than some major software out there. I will give two examples of software that we have implemented at my workplace. Maybe you'll recognize these (major, multinational) companies?

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence: Works 100% with IE. Works for report consumers with Firefox (with some loss of functionality). However, Report Studio (one of the report-authoring tools) doesn't work on anything but IE. There's no reason it couldn't be implemented with standard AJAX-type code.

BMC Software Service Desk Express (baby brother to the "Magic" helpdesk software that is very common): Works *only* on IE, doesn't work at all on other browsers.

Yes, part of the problem is these software vendors coding for IE-specific things. However, if they knew that most of their customers are probably using something else, they would code their products to support open standards. However, because MSFT has such a huge marketshare of browsers due to antitrust practices, third-parties code to support that, thus tying THEIR customers to MSFT as well.

It's a circular loop, but one possible only because MSFT used their OS dominance to push a certain browser 'standard'.

Re:Just what I want -

[bunratty]

If you check out Web browser standards support summary from Web Devout you can see Firefox 2 (and of course other Mozilla-based browsers) and Konqueror have some pretty good standards support. It's really just IE that doesn't support the standards well, judging from the fact that IE has the lowest percentage of support in most categories.