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Ballmer Pleads For Openness To Compete With Apple
mjasay writes "At the Mobile World Congress, Steve Ballmer took aim at Apple's closed iPhone ecosystem with an ironic plea for openness: 'Openness is central because it's the foundation of choice.' Ballmer has apparently forgotten his company's own efforts to vertically integrate hardware and software (Zune, XBox), its history of vertically integrating software (tying SharePoint into Office, IE, SQL Server, Active Directory, etc.), as well as years of illegally tying Windows to Internet Explorer that only the US Justice Department could undo. Indeed, Microsoft's effect on the browser market has pushed Mozilla to get involved in a recent European Commission action against the software giant, with Mozilla's Mitchell Baker recently declaring that 'A number of illegal activities were also involved in creating IE's market dominance,' now requiring government intervention to open up the browser market to fair competition. Putting aside Microsoft's own tainted reputation in the field of openness, is Ballmer right? Should Apple open up its iPhone platform to outside competition, both in terms of hardware and software?"
There are other web browsers.
Privately
Full Screen Web Browser
Anon Web Browser
There are other email programs too...
especially if you need file format compatibility
Word has file format compatibility with itself only if you never upgrade it, and if all the people youneed to share documents with have the same version.
No, Firefox won't be authorized because it allows application behavior to be modified via downloads (makes it impossible to evaluate the program as a whole) and it runs bytecode through an interpret other than Apple's (which Apple considers, rightly or wrongly, a security problem).
For your edification...
Dr. John G. Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz developed the BASIC language at Dartmouth in 1964. BASIC stood for "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code". Their objective: to create a simplified computer language for teaching students how to program. Gates and Allen recognized that the compact design of BASIC made it ideal for the limitations of the first personal computers, which had extremely restricted memory and processing power.
They ported an existing language, written by others, something like 11 years after it was invented. The newsworthy part of it is that it was done for the Altair, a computer within the grasp of many hobbyists of the time.