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Microsoft Complains About Google's Monopoly Abuse
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Frustrated at the FTC's blessing of the Google/Doubleclick merger, Microsoft is complaining to the EU. Its latest filings detail how the merger would give Google a stranglehold on the advertising industry. While these complaints aren't new, the diagram [PDF] Microsoft created gives you an interesting look at the sort of competition Microsoft fears from Google."
Everyone please ignore this post, it's another stupid myminicity thing...
Thank God for evolution.
Anyone else notice it was created on Mac OS x; "Mac OS X 10.4.11 Quartz PDFContext"
Wait Microsoft used to be cool? When was that?
Was it in 1976, when their only actual product (BASIC) was less well-known for its use than for Bill Gates's whining letter to the community scolding them for piracy?
Or was it in 1980, when they managed to dupe IBM into shipping machines with an OS they licensed in beta form, ported badly, and quietly acquired the rights to just before IBM made it popular?
Those events are my first knowledge of Microsoft, so maybe they had a few seconds of coolness somewhere even earlier than that. But if so, it was in a far more fetal stage than Google's current one.
I'd listen to them if, on page 3 of their document, competing pipes didn't suddenly become demphasised by taking on spindly shapes and MSN/Yahoo pipes didn't grey out and hide behind big red boxes.
If all those competing pipes were shown properly, everyone would see that competition still holds over 1/3 of the market in both areas mapped out instead of it appearing that a monster has taken over the advertising world.
You don't get to be a real monopoly like Microsoft without twisting the "truth", spinning FUD and using deceptive practices like these warped diagrams.
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." Lily Tomlin
The definition of a monopoly is not having 100% of the market. It is having enough (e.g. 25%) to distort the market and unfairly control your supplies or customers, e.g. to make prices rather than to take them, to dictate your own proprietary standards rather than open standards and so on.
My little Linux and tech blog
Actually, where MS went with the path separator was largely predetermined by an earlier decision. When they needed an option character for their commands, they chose '/' instead of '-' in versions of MS-DOS that didn't yet support directories.
Letters as drive labels made lots of sense when that was the only way to distinguish a device's files from another device's files.
Once directory support was added, MS's developers really wanted to use '/' so it would look like Unix. However, they were already using it as an option character. Making the command interpreter distinguish between an option and a path when both started with the same character would have been a mess. Getting people to change from '/' to '-' for options and then using '/' for directories would have been a support nightmare. So MS bit the bullet and preserved backwards compatibility with earlier mistakes.
They chose a character that was little used by everyone other than programmers, and it resembled the Unix path separator as a mirror image (I'm sure there's some font set where they look a little less alike, but...). So MS, while basically screwing the pooch on a path separator, did so by lack of foresight and not through an arbitrary decision to be different.
DOS didn't even use file handles, pipes, or command redirection until 2.0 so the path separator was far from the only thing that was strange about it to Unix programmers and Unix users.
So yes, MS operating systems have pretty much always sucked from a Unix user's perspective. However, for its day on home micros, MS-DOS was pretty cool compared to most of the alternatives until OS/2 came out. Once the 386 was mainstream, though, the free Unixes (and the original SCO) started targeting it. So OS/2, BSD, QNX, and Linux might be better than DOS, but they weren't there in the beginning.
From here down is a small treatise on what MS has done wrong, what they've done right, the state of MS vs. some alternatives, and some possible reasons. It follows from the above, but meanders well away from the topic at hand. I thought I'd give fair warning, so if you don't want to get too distracted you can just skip to another part of the thread.
MS also did a decent job, in my estimation, of making the Windows 9x compatible with enough DOS applications to make it worthwhile. They also made sure XP would run enough Win 9x apps to make it worthwhile. I haven't yet done any extensive testing of Vista because I can't get past the initial bad taste it leaves with me. From what I've read and heard from others, it seems the new OS breaks far more apps than the previous milestone OSes from Microsoft. That's largely the application vendors' fault, since it has to do with improper use of the weaknesses of XP. MS will still get most of the blame.
Other problems of Vista, like the large number of memory-bloated background tasks, probably were design trade-offs on Microsoft's part. Very likely, with a commercial OS being about five years behind schedule, there are things the developers at MS would have like to do better. They probably would have liked to simplify parts of the OS. They surely would have liked to optimize it more. However, doing more work for the sake of elegance and pushing back the delivery date even more was probably not a bankable decision.
The strength of Open Source software that's most often mentioned is probably the many eyes that can help find bugs. Another common one is that those many eyes can speed development. Yet another is that you're not trapped by one vendor, and that even if you're not a programmer you can at least still pay a third party to modify the source. On that Microsoft is probably really up against, though, is one that I don't see mentioned very often. In a command-and-control situation with a commercial goal like at Microsoft, what those limited eyes work on is dictated by the goals of the people at the top. With Open Source, the eyes look where the individual finds something interesting. If that means replacing a function th