Internet Explorer Antitrust Case Set To Expire

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Internet Explorer Antitrust Case Set To Expire

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 31, 2011 @03:50PM from the all-seeing-and-wise-benevolent-gov't-saved-us dept.

jbrodkin writes "The judgment in United States vs. Microsoft is on the verge of expiring, nearly a decade after antitrust officials ruled Microsoft unfairly limited competition against its Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft has two more weeks to fulfill the final requirements in the antitrust case, which is scheduled to expire on May 12. Although Netscape ultimately didn't benefit, the settlement seems to have done its job. From a peak of 95% market share, by some estimates Internet Explorer now has less than half of the browser market. Microsoft, of course, filed its own antitrust action against Google this week, and even commented publicly on the irony of its doing so, noting that Microsoft has 'spent more than a decade wearing the shoe on the other foot.'"

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Expired and stagnant. by ozmanjusri · 2011-03-31 15:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

The settlement did nothing. It was Mozilla and Firefox which revived competition in the browser market.

--
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
1. Re:Expired and stagnant. by RoFLKOPTr · 2011-03-31 16:00 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The settlement did nothing. It was Mozilla and Firefox which revived competition in the browser market.
  This. The field of web browser development was almost completely stagnant before Mozilla came along. Since then, the web has made massive strides in usability and function, which would not have been possible without Mozilla (and later Google). No antitrust settlement could have caused new browsers to emerge.
2. Re:Expired and stagnant. by ehrichweiss · 2011-03-31 16:11 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  I don't know if I need to remind you but Netscape was essentially Mozilla's code and they even said it in the EULA around 1994 or 95: "Remember, it's spelled N-E-T-S-C-A-P-E but it's pronounced 'Mozilla'"
  
  --
  0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
3. Re:Expired and stagnant. by RoFLKOPTr · 2011-03-31 16:23 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  I don't know if I need to remind you but Netscape was essentially Mozilla's code and they even said it in the EULA around 1994 or 95: "Remember, it's spelled N-E-T-S-C-A-P-E but it's pronounced 'Mozilla'"
  Netscape was Netscape Communications' code. "Mozilla" was simply a codename (and useragent) for the browser back in the day. When I said "before Mozilla came along" I was referring to when Netscape essentially died and forked off into what was formally and officially called Mozilla which later split into Firefox et al.
4. Re:Expired and stagnant. by sortius_nod · 2011-03-31 16:44 · Score: 2
  
  As a Chrome user I agree 100%. Mozilla got their shit together and stopped producing bloatware (Navigator, Communicator, etc) which split the market.
  If it wasn't for Mozilla I don't think Chrome would exist.
5. Re:Expired and stagnant. by Black+Parrot · 2011-03-31 17:07 · Score: 2
  
  That, and the free UNICES turned out to be so useful as servers that Microsoft was not able to pwn the internet with its own "standards".
  
  --
  Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
6. Re:Expired and stagnant. by shutdown+-p+now · 2011-03-31 17:14 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  The settlement did nothing. It was Mozilla and Firefox which revived competition in the browser market.
  Well, that's kinda the point, isn't it? Anti-competition measures, by their very definition, enable others to fairly compete on their merits without being strangled by monopolies. For Netscape it was already too late, and they weren't actually better than IE5+, even once the barriers were removed. When something that was better did finally appear (Mozilla, and ultimately Firefox), it competed on its merits - and the result is most impressive.
  Oh, and Opera? In the relevant time period this was Opera 5 & 6. Back then it was a good browser - very fast, certainly, and with a nice set of UI features - but in terms of supporting newer web standards it was even worse than IE6 (which was actually pretty good at the time it was released... it just stagnated quick afterwards).
7. Re:Expired and stagnant. by hairyfeet · 2011-03-31 17:26 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  But their code was absolute shite until they forked it as F/OSS as Mozilla. I know the theory loved by the tinfoil hat wearing crowd here is poor wittle Netscape beaten to death by the big bad MSFT, but you know what? Speaking for myself and the countless greybeards that had been actual customers of NS (hell I probably still got my NS4 disc in one of my storage lockers somewhere) who all ended up switching to IE I can tell you that it wasn't that we liked IE per se, it was that NS 4 was shit. It wasn't even a good hearty morning log, it was a weak runny stream of foul smelling shit after a bad illness kind of shit.
  Here, let me do my impression of running NS4 for all those that didn't have the "enjoyment" of running it back in its day: "Oh look I got my shotgunned modems all screaming, I got Win98 stripped down and humming like a tweaked out Chevy, i'm good to go baby yeah! Let me just fire up my new NS4.../NS4 crashes hard/...Huh. Probably just a glitch, it happens. So I'll just fire up NS4 and head to my favorite.../NS4 locks up/...Motherfucker! Maybe the site just has some bad code on it, wouldn't surprise me. So I'll just relaunch and choose a different site and.../NS4 crashes hard and BSODs OS with it/ $&^%$^%$&^$&^$!
  And THAT, that right there, is why IE won. NS4 was a buggy pile of total shit and by the time they got the bugs ironed out enough for the product to actually be usable nobody used it anymore. Just like the old DBase II they released half assed not ready for alpha testing code and paid the price.
  Was MSFT douchebags? Yep, old Bill was a nerd that had been shoved into too many lockers and took everything as a "kill crush destroy!" mandate, but NS wouldn't have disappeared so quickly if it had actually been anything but poo. look up MSFT talking about IE 4, which was before they had bundled anything, and you'll see them talking about how it was a fight to keep the server from overloading and how they were sending out over 150,000 copies on CD weekly. They were getting slammed because people were going out of their way to get IE and get off NS because the simple fact is in EVERY single way hat counts to an end user IE was better. It was faster, it was more stable, it used less memory at a time when 16Mb was common, and for awhile there it was even more standards compliant (anybody remember the NS blink tag?).
  So lets give credit where credit was due, it was the Moz foundation that took the steaming pile of poo that was NS and hammered it into something usable by the masses. It took them awhile, and they had some serious growing pains like the 2.x.x branch memory leaks, but thanks to them we now have a wealth of choices, all for free. We have the Gecko based like Seamonkey, FF, and Kmeleon, we have the Chromium/Webkit based like Chrome, Comodo Dragon, SWIron, Chromium, Safari, and finally we have Presto in Opera that most people forget before Mozilla made third party browsers free was a for pay product.
  So thanks Moz, while my users are in the process of being switched over to Chromium based Dragon for performance and security reason you still made non IE browsers free for the masses and gave us a wealth of choice. Thanks.
  
  --
  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
8. Re:Expired and stagnant. by ndarsana · 2011-03-31 17:39 · Score: 1
  
  Thanks for sharing.
  
  --
  Regards Visit practicesuite.com
9. Re:Expired and stagnant. by Anonymous Coward · 2011-03-31 18:29 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  BSODding an OS tells something about the host OS too.
10. Re:Expired and stagnant. by wvmarle · 2011-03-31 18:31 · Score: 1
  
  TFA and TFS both talk about "milestones" that have to be reached.
  Unfortunately neither gives a clue on what those milestones are!
  Anyone, please? I'm curious what the terms were (in simple human language, not legalese), and which MS reached and which not.
11. Re:Expired and stagnant. by wvmarle · 2011-03-31 19:14 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  (anybody remember the NS blink tag?)
  You mean that was not an html standard? I didn't know. And boy do I remember that... horrible. Makes the text involved so hard to read, especially when used on not a single word but a complete paragraph. My regard of the html standards board just went up :) At least they didn't invent that horror.
12. Re:Expired and stagnant. by Andrei+D · 2011-03-31 19:51 · Score: 2
  
  I still remember that, in my early days as a Linux user (circa 2000), I had a relatively decent machine. I was using Red Hat 6.2 with XFree86 and Window Maker at the time. Netscape was indeed slow, so I clocked it to see how long it takes to start (display the home page): 51 fucking seconds.
  
  --
  We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us
13. Re:Expired and stagnant. by georgesdev · 2011-03-31 20:07 · Score: 1
  
  I used Netscape on a Silicon Graphics workstation for many years. I loved it.
  I only switched to Internet Explorer later, and on a PC.
  Then I happily switched back to Firefox.
  For embedded systems, I don't use Firefox, but that's another story.
14. Re:Expired and stagnant. by Clubbah · 2011-03-31 23:55 · Score: 1
  
  At the time, Netscape pioneered the browser for the common guy. They started on *nix but brought the browser to Windows. Their IPO was the biggest skyrocket in history (at the time I believe). Shot up from 16 or so to 80 in a few hours. Netscape was the world's darling at the dawn of the public internet.
  
  Microsoft was in denial of the internet's staying power and just thought it was a fad. They (not so) quickly realized their mistake and attempted to force their way into the market. At the time, the browser and web servers were really the only commercially viable product for software venders to get into the market.
  
  They bought a company and labeled their product MSIE. To kill off netscape (which had started making servers using NSAPI technology) they bundled their browser in the OS, so now, Netscape had to compete with free. At the time, that was a very novel concept. Microsoft implemented ISAPI in IIS which was essentially the same thing.
  
  In making custom HTML tags that only MS used, MS attempted to make the WWW a proprietary standard that MS controlled. Other browsers wouldn't render sites made using proprietary IE tags and they risked getting sued for implementing MS custom tag rendering algorithms in their browsers.
  
  This also gave them a shoehorn into the server market. IIS/NT 3.5/4.0 was pretty horrible compared to Unix/Novell but they wanted to get into that market. (read: dominate). What better to serve proprietary IE tags than IIS.
15. Re:Expired and stagnant. by Daniel_Staal · 2011-03-31 23:55 · Score: 1
  
  Correlation is not causation. It's likely that Firefox, Crome, Opera, etc, would all be exactly where they are today without the settlement. The settlement doesn't appear to have helped or hurt anyone's participation in the market.
  (And I'm not sure any barriers were removed, actually. You still can barely buy a machine without Windows, and it will have IE and I think only IE on it. That was the complaint.)
  
  --
  'Sensible' is a curse word.
16. Re:Expired and stagnant. by Tim+C · 2011-03-31 23:57 · Score: 1
  
  Thank you. I generally end up writing something along these lines every time IE vs Netscape stories are published; I stuck with Netscape because I hated IE, not because it was better (or even any good). IE4 was on a par, and IE5 blew it away.
  I'm glad I'm not the only one that remembers those days.
  
  --
  It's official. Most of you are morons.
17. Re:Expired and stagnant. by springbox · 2011-04-01 00:30 · Score: 1
  
  Yep, it was Win 9x. Not a big surprise.
18. Re:Expired and stagnant. by erroneus · 2011-04-01 01:30 · Score: 1
  
  Microsoft's offerings were broken and vendor specific. Microsoft's undisciplined "innovation" led to a huge mess in (and lots of resentment from) the web development community. Furthermore, their Active-X was and still is a huge hole that further locks "web" into something exclusively vendor and platform dependant.
  "Embrace and extend" is old news but it has been painfully repeated by Microsoft over and over and over again -- taking standards and twisting them into vendor and platform specific implementations. They did it with LDAP, they did it with HTML/CSS, did it with Java and I am sure there are other examples as well. They do it all at the expense of the larger industry and its users.
  What's worse is that Microsoft isn't 100% compatible with Microsoft. Their code is heavily dependant on their platform and other programs usually included within their platform (such as MSIE.) This results in needing MSIE in order to run other programs such as Outlook or Word. The ugly truth comes out when something is changed or patched in the libraries and APIs provided by their platform or other programs. Suddenly, this change affects everything else seemingly unrelated. So when one user's platform and dependencies are slightly different from the next (say, a different version of MSIE or MS Office or even a different patch level of any of those) you witness document incompatibilities which are inexplicable to users.
  Microsoft isn't even disciplined enough to keep their code and standards specific and fully documented. How can they faithfully implement web standards or any other standard? They can't and they don't... not the way they are doing it anyway.
  I think your definition of "junk" is "doesn't look good on MSIE" or "It only looks good when using MSIE" which is a kind of lie that users believe and that people in the web development side of things know to be infuriating.
19. Re:Expired and stagnant. by ArhcAngel · 2011-04-01 02:02 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, I remember those days well. I also remember Windows 95 doing all those things all by itself. Not even running any programs. Not to mention the lengths Microsoft went to make sure competing products were at a disadvantage.
  
  --
  "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
20. Re:Expired and stagnant. by drinkypoo · 2011-04-01 02:16 · Score: 1
  
  /NS4 crashes hard and BSODs OS with it/ $&^%$^%$&^$&^$!
  ABSOLUTELY NOT. The OS DECIDED to crash. Nothing an application can do can crash an operating system, short of a forkbomb, and if that can crash your OS here's a nickel, get a real OS.
  When NT blue-screens the problem is a driver, hardware, or NT itself. The problem was NOT your web browser.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
21. Re:Expired and stagnant. by morgauxo · 2011-04-01 03:16 · Score: 1
  
  I actually liked Netscape, at least until it turned into adware around version 5 or so. Did Netscape 4 make a computer crash? Maybe. How would I tell, given the state of Windows back then? If you didn't have the latest bleeding edge hardware of the time IE slowed your machine to a crawl once it started merging into the Windows Operating System. And then there was Netscape for Linux. I don't remember any crashes there, not in the browser or the OS.
22. Re:Expired and stagnant. by morgauxo · 2011-04-01 03:45 · Score: 1
  
  What good is the wayback archive when browsers won't even display that stuff any more? Are future generations going to whip out a 486 with win95 and NS3 just to play with that? If they do will they be able to navigate the internet archive site on those browsers to even get to the old stuff? Will they navigate the wayback machine in a new browser just to save the old page on their local disk to view that in an old browser running in a virtual machine running win9x?
  
  Actually though, my real purpose to comment is "How about a little devil's advocate for the 'bad old days' of web design?".
  
  Sure blink tags, sites made entirely of graphics in tables, awful colors, etc... were horrible. But that style of design was accessible. What I mean is anybody can come up with that crap. These days if you have content you want to put online you either have to be a really good web designer with both artistic skills and extensive knowledge of css or you have to make a cookie cutter site. A typical site today is usually just yet another iteration of some Wordpress theme, or worse yet just a Facebook or Twitter page. How boring is that?
  
  Did I mention that much of css is evil, counter-intuitive and crippling? For example, please tell me how to make a two columned page where at least one of the columns is dynamic content of varying length. You can't just specify hardcoded sizes due to that dynamic content! Perhaps one column is your menu/sidebar and the other is the main content. Make the two columns always be the same height regardless of content size. If one column just suddenly stops half way down the page because the other one happens to have more content that is just butt ugly and seems sloppy.
  
  Now do it in css without abusing the table tag. If there is a way will it handle 3 columns? No, javascript is cheating! At best it causes the text on the page to jump when it runs which may annoy a quick reader who has already started reading. At worst it may not run at all if some other javascript on the page happens to cause an error in that particular user's browser or if the browser has javascript turned off. This is just one example... css / current web standards suck.
  
  Of course my premise that site designers then or now commonly have actual content worth bothering to post in the first place is highly debatable...
23. Re:Expired and stagnant. by stewski · 2011-04-01 04:45 · Score: 1
  
  IE6 good at web standards for the time? That depends if you think a deliberately crippled implementation of the CSS box model (embrace and extend) is better than no support. - As a web developer I'd say that "support" has proven to be more harmful to the web than none at all, which may have been exactly the point.
24. Re:Expired and stagnant. by recoiledsnake · 2011-04-01 04:49 · Score: 1
  
  Could've been an Pre-OS X Mac OS too. So it could be a surprise.
  
  --
  This space for rent.
25. Re:Expired and stagnant. by greed · 2011-04-01 05:37 · Score: 1
  
  While I agree with out about Netscape 4 in every possible way--it could be made stable-ish on UNIX and Mac by turning off everything that wasn't in 3....
  To me, the point of the anti-competition claim wasn't that Netscape got screwed.
  It's much more about all the projects that never got started, or never saw the light of day, because people looked at what happened to Netscape and didn't even try.
  That's the important thing.
  But at least, on the Mac, we had iCab for our happy browsing needs.
26. Re:Expired and stagnant. by ehrichweiss · 2011-04-01 08:56 · Score: 1
  
  I too used one on my SGI's..very fast. I tried to get Firefox compiled for the R4400's but never got a successful build and eventually I moved over to Linux entirely so there was no need. I still have my Extreme, Impact and Octane's though...
  
  --
  0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
27. Re:Expired and stagnant. by RavenLrD20k · 2011-04-01 14:43 · Score: 1
  
  How about this site as an example of dynamic content with a static menu using php with no JavaScript save for the StatCounter and embedded chat client? This is essentially what you are talking about with a two column page, the left column used for links that are a fixed amount of data that remain on the page without scrolling off, regardless of how much data must be scrolled through in column 2. It's all done through CSS.
  While I can't say that the information on the site is worthwhile per se ( I agree that many personal sites, including this one referenced, tend to have a lot of drivel on it), I post it here only as an example of what is achievable with properly used CSS.
28. Re:Expired and stagnant. by drinkypoo · 2011-04-01 17:01 · Score: 1
  
  I still have a Windows 98 machine, and before that I had DOS machines, and before that I had an Amiga, and before that an Apple ][.
  In any case, any app running in protected mode in win9x that produces a blue screen had better have been accessing some hardware directly. Problem is, it often wasn't.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
29. Re:Expired and stagnant. by georgesdev · 2011-04-01 20:18 · Score: 1
  
  Let me guess, you worked for Sgi?
  Which country?
  I worked for Sgi, but I've dumped my Extreme since. Switched to Linux too.
30. Re:Expired and stagnant. by ehrichweiss · 2011-04-02 01:29 · Score: 1
  
  Nope, but I wanted to work for them; I was a 3D animator back in the mid-90's till about 2004. I'm seriously only keeping the Extreme because the prices for them keep going up and I figure eventually I'll get what I paid for it...heh.(I bought all of them used thankfully)
  
  --
  0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
wrong by phantomfive · 2011-03-31 15:59 · Score: 2, Insightful

I always thought the outcome of the anti-trust suit was completely wrong. Yes Microsoft was engaging in horribly unethical behavior, but what they did with Netscape wasn't very bad, really. They should have the right to bundle whatever software they want with the OS. The whole attempt to make it inseparable from the OS was a bit dodgy, but Google is essentially trying the same thing with Chrome OS.

The thing Microsoft did that was REALLY bad was not allowing OEMs to use Windows if they offered other operating systems, even if they still offered Windows. That is a clear and obvious abuse of a monopoly, and should be punished. And yet for some reason the focus was still on Netscape.

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
1. Re:wrong by no+known+priors · 2011-03-31 16:09 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  To settle its own antitrust suit back in 2002, Microsoft had to agree to new Windows licensing requirements and "a prohibition on retaliation against OEMs for promoting competing middleware and operating systems." Although roughly nine out of 10 desktops and laptops still run Windows, Department of Justice documents say "these provisions are working as planned," and note that "Dell has begun to ship PCs loaded with the Linux operating system in place of Windows."
  
  ---
  I have to say, it's all part of the same systematic tactics to crush competition. By forcing Netscape out of the market, MS could potentially sell more copies of IIS, what with the MSIE only extensions. Netscape was not just competing for browser share. Not to mention another quote: "Microsoft's anticompetitive activities also affected Sun's Java technologies. "
  Also, the article talks a lot about Google. Microsoft is basically being hypocritical. But that's not news. It's not news that a corporation wants to be able to screw over consumers and competitor, but objects to competitor doing the same.
  Personally I use Google search because it seems to work the best for me. However, I never let 'em set cookies, and rarely let 'em run JavaScript. I don't use any other Google tool on a regular basis ('cept for Maps). I don't trust Google, but I don't trust any big corporation. Fuck 'em all.
  
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  Appended to the end of comments you post. The maximum is 120 characters.
2. Re:wrong by bloodhawk · 2011-03-31 16:10 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  but they did allow OEM's to use other operating systems. The issue was that they gave preferrential pricing to OEM's that agreed to pay based on the number of machines they shipped, hence the best pricing came by licensing for every machine. bas
3. Re:wrong by phantomfive · 2011-03-31 16:16 · Score: 2
  
  I don't trust Google, but I don't trust any big corporation.
  
  Do you trust anyone? I mean really? Is there a reason to trust the little guys any more than the big guys? I thought our reason for having contracts was basically because we can't trust anyone.
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
4. Re:wrong by Anonymous Coward · 2011-03-31 16:21 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I'm going to have to disagree on 2/3 of your arguments. First of all, yes what they did with Netscape was terrible. The anti-trust judgement was brought because it was a classic case of monopoly abuse. Microsoft used their exceedingly dominant position in Operating Systems as leverage to gain ground in the Web Browser market. Integrating IE into the OS really only did 2 things: 1) ensured that the average user would never look any further for a web browser (in fact, most new users weren't, until the last few years, aware that anything other than the blue 'e' existed for browsing the web) and 2) opened a number of security vulnerabilities due, in large part, to the browser's close ties to the OS.
  Your evaluation of ChromeOS is, IMHO, completely off base. ChromeOS is a browser-based OS. The UI is a browser. That's pretty much it. Windows, on the other hand, was an OS which had a browser integrated for no other real reason beyond crushing the competition. It'd have been one thing if IE were simply free, however, I can still remember seeing boxes to buy it in stores. It was made free once they realized it was the only way to win. ChromeOS, in contrast, is simply banking on the fact that webapps are "good enough" for most people for most things at this point and that they can simply do away with the rest of the OS pretty much all together.
  As for abusing their monopoly in regards to OEMs, I'll agree, though they aren't the only ones that engaged in this behavior in this market (see: Intel).
5. Re:wrong by calmofthestorm · 2011-03-31 16:30 · Score: 2
  
  You shouldn't say bad things about the Corporation. The Corporation loves you.
  
  --
  93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
6. Re:wrong by similar_name · 2011-03-31 16:50 · Score: 2
  
  Is there a reason to trust the little guys any more than the big guys?
  I think there is. While it is true that trust can be betrayed by anyone, there are differences between a small organization and a large one (small business vs large corporation). It is generally easier to get access to the owner of a small business as opposed to the CEO of a large corporation. In addition and also related, a large corporation will usually have more layers between the top and bottom strata of their workforce. This very often leaves (upper) management without any concept of a connection to the customer other than as a statistic. Company structure becomes more dependent on rules and less influenced by fairness and trust.
  
  IMHO Big Banks, Big Business, Big Union, Big Government, Big Religion, all have very similar problems. Having too much trust is generally not one of them. They are like an evil patriarch that has hidden all of his wealth, lies on his death bed, and swears that if you don't do everything to keep him alive he will hurt your children.
7. Re:wrong by phantomfive · 2011-03-31 17:14 · Score: 1
  
  I'm going to have to disagree on 2/3 of your arguments
  ok, but let's look at history. Do you remember active desktop? Microsoft, once they discovered the internet, began to conceive that the desktop was just a portal to the internet, a window to the world, so to speak. They took it so far that filenames became and acted like links instead of normal double-click icons. They had the idea that software run on the desktop would be like a hybrid local/remote thing. This is where the name .net came from, even though a large chunk of the .net api has nothing to do with the net. They were trying to grab on the trend that became known as Software as a Service, then cloud computing. Microsoft truly bought into the hype of the early .com days.
  
  And what is Google trying to do with ChromeOS? Basically the same thing, an OS that is hooked into the cloud. And my guess is it will be just as (un)successful. But I don't know the future.
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
8. Re:wrong by no+known+priors · 2011-03-31 17:17 · Score: 1
  
  I use my own mail. I have a domain (or two) and I normally get my mail down via either POP or IMAP. I used to use Yahoo a lot, back in the day, but it seems the only people who email me there now are corporations I haven't given an email at one of my domains.
  Yeah baby.
  
  --
  Appended to the end of comments you post. The maximum is 120 characters.
9. Re:wrong by shutdown+-p+now · 2011-03-31 17:20 · Score: 1
  
  Do you trust anyone? I mean really? Is there a reason to trust the little guys any more than the big guys?
  Well, yes. Thing is, individual persons have ethics, and you can usually assess if they are compatible with yours when you meet with them and talk to them (sure, there are good conmen, but on average this still holds).
  Corporations don't have ethics (aside from PR veneer). People constituting them do, but corporations are structured such that any ethical concerns are diluted over a large body of people where no-one in particular is blamed; and for those cases where a decision must be made at a single point, that's precisely the kinds of positions (usually high-level) where sociopaths thrive in corporate cultures. It's not that they're deliberately sought, it's that "selection of the fittest" within that environment produces such results.
  So, yeah, I'll take the "little guy" - a person whom I meet and make a deal face-to-face - over a "big guy" any day, as far as chances of being screwed go.
  Of course, there are only so much things the "little guys" can handle without growing bigger.
10. Re:wrong by phantomfive · 2011-03-31 17:31 · Score: 2
  
  So, a couple of people here have responded saying that ya, they trust the little guys sometimes. But really, how much would you trust them? Would you do business worth a million dollars without a contract? What about 10 thousand dollars? What about five hundred. We don't even get married without a contract, and hopefully you are marrying someone you can trust at least as much as anyone else.
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
11. Re:wrong by phantomfive · 2011-03-31 17:41 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Now, my memory is that the contract was based on more than the number of machines they shipped. That's what Intel got convicted of not long ago. But Microsoft was going even farther, limiting OEMs.
  
  I remember back then our purchasing manager told me about a conversation he had with some OEMs (we didn't want Windows), and they basically said they couldn't give us computers without Windows because of Microsoft. If you're influencing your resellers like that, then you are abusing your monopoly position. This is part of how they crushed OS/2 warp, which was a far superior OS at that time.
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
12. Re:wrong by Cinder6 · 2011-03-31 17:44 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  IANAL, but I've always figured this is allowed for two reasons.
  1. Apple makes hardware that comes with a "special" OS on it. Nobody is stopping you from installing anything else.
  2. Apple is unilaterally "hostile" to all other companies--they don't play favorites, they don't strong arm anyone into using their products, but they don't let anyone install OS X. Microsoft basically said, "If you work with anyone else, you can't do business with us." Apple just says, "You can't do business with us."
  (There's also the fact that Apple's marketshare was and is a fraction of Microsoft's.)
  I would be interested to hear with somebody who actually knows what they're talking about, though. What makes Apple's situation acceptable in the eyes of the law?
  
  --
  If you can't convince them, convict them.
13. Re:wrong by shutdown+-p+now · 2011-03-31 18:19 · Score: 2
  
  Depends on how much I (think I) know that someone. On a few occasions, I have trusted people with what amounts to several thousand dollars.
14. Re:wrong by SuricouRaven · 2011-03-31 18:35 · Score: 1
  
  Don't forget their use of bundling to enter the media technology sector. The inclusion of Windows Media Player with windows killed off Winamp and just about every other small media player there was, and then they made sure their WMA format became established by including a WMA-only CD ripping capability with the OS. The WMA format is so horrible it failed to displace MP3 even with that advantage (It's the only audio file format I know capable of carrying a virus), but without that bundling it would probably be completly unknown. The same thing for Windows Movie Maker and it's WMV-only export capability. The intention to me seems obvious - get people to use the conveniently supplied tools and thus amass collections of WMA and WMV files, effectively tying them to the Windows platform and to Media Player - as it's legally difficult to have any other player read them. Microsoft patented the container, thus why Virtualdub had to drop support.
  
  WMV can at least be defended for having one of the best video codecs available for low-bitrate at the time. Maybe Realplayer could compete for cramming video through dialup, but the player was a piece of bloated, painful adware.
15. Re:wrong by SuricouRaven · 2011-03-31 18:42 · Score: 1
  
  "What does increased browser market share really accomplish?"
  
  Cross-promotion. Internet explorer had MSN set as it's default homepage. It had bookmarks set by default to Microsoft's sites and it's partners. Just open IE (I'm going to assume you never deleted them) and look at the ones included - MSN Autos, MSN Money, MSN Money, MSN sport, MSN news, Microsoft at Home, Microsoft at Work, Microsoft Store. I can't remember what the old IE6 did searchwise, but later on they would use IE to heavily promote Bing by making it the default search provider - perhaps the only reason anyone uses Bing at all, as there was no other reason to switch from the firmly established Google. Microsoft makes no money from IE directly, but it serves to drive customers to their commercial services.
16. Re:wrong by wvmarle · 2011-03-31 18:49 · Score: 1
  
  There is one reason to trust the big guys more than the little guys: the big guys have more to lose for doing things wrong.
  In general one may assume that a business is there to do business, and make money, long term. Trust is one of their main assets: lose it, and you lose your business.
  However the prerequisite for this is proper government regulation of businesses (big or small), and proper checks and balances, in an open society. When it comes to privacy these days the US government unfortunately can not be trusted any more, and with that US companies lose a lot of trust for me as well. European governments are better though also deteriorating recently. So I can understand you don't trust companies for that reason.
17. Re:wrong by Cederic · 2011-03-31 20:00 · Score: 1
  
  (There's also the fact that Apple's marketshare was and is a fraction of Microsoft's.)
  I would be interested to hear with somebody who actually knows what they're talking about, though. What makes Apple's situation acceptable in the eyes of the law?
  I don't know what I'm talking about (see my posting history ;) but you've already answered your own question.
  Apple weren't exploiting a dominant market position to prevent competition.
18. Re:wrong by 91degrees · 2011-03-31 20:18 · Score: 1
  
  Apple don't have a monopoly on desktop operating systems though. They aren't using their market position to bully other companies to only use their software.
  
  And Apple considers the ability to run another OS as a feature of the mac.
19. Re:wrong by TheRaven64 · 2011-03-31 23:47 · Score: 2
  
  Is there a reason to trust the little guys any more than the big guys?
  A couple of reasons, yes:
  First, small companies typically don't have large teams of lawyers on the payroll. This means that a lawsuit is as expensive for them as it is for you, so it's in their interest to resolve any problems before they get to the stage where you'd consider suing them.
  Secondly, there is the idea of personal accountability. When I deal with a small company, I usually deal with a single individual who has the authority to make decisions. At the very least, I deal with someone who has a direct line to the person who can make decisions. When I deal with a big company, the person I talk to often doesn't even have a way of getting a message to the person who can actually make important decisions.
  As a corollary to the second point, employees at small companies tend to feel that they have more of a personal stake in the company's reputation. This is especially true for cooperatives, where the shareholders are the employees. If your behaviour has a significant impact on the company's reputation, and your income depends on the company's reputation, then you have a strong incentive to not to harm that reputation.
  Of course, there are exceptions in both directions, but all other things being equal I'd pick the small company over the large company.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
20. Re:wrong by TheRaven64 · 2011-04-01 00:16 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I don't understand why everybody seems to think there were sinister intentions behind Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. What does increased browser market share really accomplish?
  Were you not alive in the '90s, or were you just not paying attention? Microsoft saw Netscape as a real threat. Microsoft had two products that accounted for over 95% of their total income: Windows and Office. No one bought Windows because they liked Windows, they bought it because it ran the software that they liked (that's not to say that they disliked Windows - although a lot did - just that the OS was irrelevant to most computer buyers). If web applications started to take off (and Netscape was aiming to make their browser a thin client interface) then there was a lot less of a reason to buy Windows.
  Microsoft wanted to avoid this, so they introduced ActiveX. This let you write incredibly rich web applications, because you were basically just shipping a Windows binary to the client and running it in a browser. Internet Explorer existed to push ActiveX. With ActiveX established, web applications would just mean Windows applications that happened to be delivered over HTTP with a little bit of HTML glue, and the Windows monopoly would be safe. There was no chance of getting other browser makers to support ActiveX, because they also supported other platforms and it was against their interests to promote a single-platform technology on the web. IE was given away for free, back when Netscape was only free for noncommercial use. Microsoft dumped it at below cost to encourage people to use it and to drive the competition out of business.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
21. Re:wrong by jbengt · 2011-04-01 01:40 · Score: 1
  
  We don't even get married without a contract, . . .
  
  Umm, marriage is a contract, by definition.
22. Re:wrong by jbengt · 2011-04-01 02:37 · Score: 1
  
  . . . basically because we can't trust anyone.
  If you've ever walked across a bridge, ridden in an airplane, crossed a busy street with a green light, etc., you've trusted complete strangers.
23. Re:wrong by BZ · 2011-04-01 03:10 · Score: 1
  
  > Nobody is stopping you from installing anything else.
  This is true for their desktop products, but iOS makes anything Microsoft ever did seem pretty tame by comparison. Compare the differences between trying to use a non-Trident browser on Windows at any point in time and trying to use a non-mobile-Safari browser (in terms of the rendering engine, not the user interface; the mobile Safari rendering engine is no a vanilla WebKit).
24. Re:wrong by jbengt · 2011-04-01 03:41 · Score: 1
  
  Someone else said it better in this thread, but it wasn't really about the browser, it was about the server and operating system. Netscape had the ambition to make server-based applications that ran in OS agnostic browsers and sell the software to run the servers and browsers, (together with all the lock-in they could muster to keep MS at bay). Free distribution of IE made it hard for Netscape to make money.
25. Re:wrong by similar_name · 2011-04-01 09:04 · Score: 1
  
  While a contract can delegate the issue of trust to enforcement by a governing body they have another benefit as well. A contract clearly states what is expected of each party. Friends can often have falling outs when one does work or service for the other and things don't go as anticipated by either party. It's often not a matter of trust but of expectations.
  
  For large corporations contracts and policies are implemented to control expectations. As a result expectations may be clear to the consumer as well (that's another topic). In smaller businesses trust is usually more important and implicit as expectations for every circumstance have not been formally defined.
  
  When dealing with a small business and things go wrong (e.g. supply costs out side of the control of the business) you want to trust the business to do what they can to shoulder the increase. When dealing with a large corporation there is generally the expectation that anything outside of the control of the company will be passed on to you. A small business can better make the decision to take less in profits or even a loss to keep a customer that is loyal. In such a case the business may even need to trust the customer. It is very difficult for a large organization to have any trust built into its structure.
  
  It may just be a matter of the semantic differences between 'trust' and 'broad complex explicit expectations enforceable by law'. How much money you are willing to exchange with another is not just a matter of trust. It becomes a matter of expectations and agreeing to every conceivable outcome before hand.
  
  I originally posted because I 'felt' that there were reasons to trust small business more than large ones. As I've attempted to answer why I've come to the conclusion that it is based on the practicalities of business structure. A small business will tend to rely more on implicit expectations which in turn rely on trust. As a business grows expectations will become more explicit and as a result rely less on trust. In fact many large business explicitly state that they make no implicit agreement (i.e. no expectation of trust).
26. Re:wrong by yuhong · 2011-04-02 20:06 · Score: 1
  
  Well, I think NT was the real pig at the time. But yea, I know about OS/2 for Windows was created to make OS/2 cheaper for those who already have a Windows license.
Anti-trust is always bad by mfh · 2011-03-31 16:09 · Score: 5, Interesting

Microsoft does some things right and other things really wrong, but never only one or the other... their forced efforts are always a sad uneven mixture of the two.
IE has always been terrible. Perhaps when Netscape was just starting out, IE may have been somewhat better from a UI standpoint only, with fancy hooks into the OS of the day... but standards trump bells and whistles and IE cannot compete against browsers coded correctly. This is typically because the philosophy of these other products available is to create something that delivers web content safely, rather than trying to control the internet by stifling web development into a proprietary lock-in scheme designed to generate wealth rather than deliver what people want.

--
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
1. Re:Anti-trust is always bad by Grygus · 2011-03-31 16:28 · Score: 1
  
  Not really disputing your main point but I think you took it too far; IE 5 was the best browser for a time, and IE 9 seems pretty strong, even if it's not the best.
2. Re:Anti-trust is always bad by FranTaylor · 2011-03-31 16:43 · Score: 1
  
  It is precisely the openness of Firefox etc that makes them better browsers.
  If you want to debug your web application you are free to dive right into the browser's source in your debugger and figure out what they are doing with your content. IE will never have this capability (at least for the masses) whereas it can be easily enabled in firefox by simply installing the debug package.
3. Re:Anti-trust is always bad by bigstrat2003 · 2011-03-31 16:58 · Score: 1
  
  Indeed. I did most of my dicking around developing web pages when IE4 was out, not IE5, but IE4 was head and shoulders above Netscape from a developer's standpoint. Accordingly, it also was superior from a user standpoint because web pages which utilized IE's capabilities could offer a better experience.
  
  --
  "16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
4. Re:Anti-trust is always bad by drsmithy · 2011-03-31 17:22 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  IE has always been terrible. Perhaps when Netscape was just starting out, IE may have been somewhat better from a UI standpoint only, with fancy hooks into the OS of the day [...]
  You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
5. Re:Anti-trust is always bad by shutdown+-p+now · 2011-03-31 17:24 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Perhaps when Netscape was just starting out, IE may have been somewhat better from a UI standpoint only, with fancy hooks into the OS of the day
  In terms of web standards IE5 and IE6 were significantly better than competing versions of Netscape. And, no, this wasn't back when Netscape "was just starting out" (that was way before IE1!), but it was in the last days of Netscape.
  
  trying to control the internet by stifling web development into a proprietary lock-in scheme designed to generate wealth rather than deliver what people want.
  Um, did you miss the whole Netscape proprietary <layer> thingy, when there would be sites on the Net that would say "This website requires Netscape Navigator"?
6. Re:Anti-trust is always bad by phantomfive · 2011-03-31 17:43 · Score: 1
  
  Wow really? Have you ever gone into the browser's source code? I've never even thought of trying that. Does it help??
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
7. Re:Anti-trust is always bad by shriphani · 2011-03-31 18:28 · Score: 1
  
  What ?
8. Re:Anti-trust is always bad by Aphrika · 2011-03-31 18:32 · Score: 1
  
  I'm pretty sure that if you need to look at a browser's source code to fix a problem in a website, then you're doing it wrong.
  
  IE has the F12 developer debug tools since IE6 and they do the same job as the Firefox ones as far as I'm aware.
9. Re:Anti-trust is always bad by yuhong · 2011-04-02 20:17 · Score: 1
  
  It isn't just <layer>. It began when then-Mosaic Netscape introduced <center> and <font> and some new attributes when they released 0.9 in October 1994. By 1995 Netscape had gained a monopoly, and other browsers (including early MSIE) had to copy their tags. This monopoly effectively killed HTML+/HTML 3.0 which browsers other than Mosaic/Netscape that existed in 1994 (like Viola and Arena) already supported. W3C ended up creating 3.2 to standardize some of the new Netscape/Microsoft tags after the failure. Eventually with Gecko they changed their ways but that took years to be stable enough while MS was making new releases every year or so.
10. Re:Anti-trust is always bad by yuhong · 2011-04-02 20:30 · Score: 1
  
  And I forgot to say MS continued to add their own extensions to particularly CSS, all while not fixing their non-compliance of CSS1 until IE6.
Netscape was mainly to blame for their failure by TheLink · 2011-03-31 16:10 · Score: 2, Interesting

Yeah back then Netscape was actually WORSE than IE.

Microsoft may have stepped on their toes, but Netscape themselves were to blame for blowing away their own feet.

I used Netscape from 1.x till 4.7. And at the ending stages Netscape was inferior. It was slower in rendering and crashed more. Trust me I tried to look for alternatives to IE at that time.

Mozilla and Mozilla based versions of Netscape (e.g. Netscape 6) were crap too and not worth the megabytes of download. I tried Opera too but it just didn't fit with the way I did things back then.

Mozilla only got usable a few years ago (2005? 2006? Barely usable too - still had many memory issues back then) and that's when it started gaining marketshare.

If you think I'm trolling or talking shit, just look at Google Chome - it has gained so much share in a far far shorter time than Mozilla took.

Even nontechs/nonnerds are downloading and installing Google Chrome and recommending it to their friends.

FWIW, I'm currently using Mozilla for TreeStyleTabs, Noscript, Adblock Plus and Certificate Patrol :).
--
- Too many replies beneath your current threshold
1. Re:Netscape was mainly to blame for their failure by kvvbassboy · 2011-03-31 16:23 · Score: 2
  
  "Mozilla only got usable a few years ago (2005? 2006? Barely usable too - still had many memory issues back then) and that's when it started gaining marketshare." I would say sometime around 2004, it was the first time I used Firefox. I loved it instantly, tabbed browsing and everything. I wondered why everyone wasn't using it already. I don't know about memory issues, but it was already much more secure than Internet Explorer.
2. Re:Netscape was mainly to blame for their failure by RoFLKOPTr · 2011-03-31 16:38 · Score: 2
  
  Mozilla only got usable a few years ago (2005? 2006? Barely usable too - still had many memory issues back then) and that's when it started gaining marketshare. If you think I'm trolling or talking shit, just look at Google Chome - it has gained so much share in a far far shorter time than Mozilla took.
  I've been using Firefox on and off since before 1.0. I had no problems with it back then. It was horrible compared to the standards of today, but it was still better than fucking IE6. I think we could attribute Chrome's rapid market share gain at least in part, though, to the fact that people are now aware of (and actively seeking) newer better ways to browse the web, and it has been backed by a multi-billion-dollar household name since the get go. Firefox really started the alternative browser trend, so it took a long time to gain steam.
3. Re:Netscape was mainly to blame for their failure by BZ · 2011-04-01 02:54 · Score: 1
  
  > it has gained so much share in a far far shorter time
  > than Mozilla took.
  There are two important differences:
  1) Chrome is operating in an environment where websites are NOT just authoring to IE anymore; site compat is somewhat easier to come by and hence user adoption is easier.
  2) Chrome has had a huge marketing campaign going for it starting the monent it was released. It's advertised in huge and expensive ad campaigns on subways. It's advertised on Google's web properties. It's advertised via banner ads all over the internet. Mozilla back when it started just didn't have the financial resources for an ad campaign like that. Heck, I don't think it has them now. I'd be interested in comparing the amount of money it would take to purchase the various Chrome yearly advertising (including the Google property placements, which are being provided in-kind and not for cash, of course) on the market to Mozilla's total yearly budget. Based on what I've seen, I would not be surprised if the first number is higher. So Mozilla had to depend on word-of-mouth, which depends on how many users you have, which was small at the time.
  > Even nontechs/nonnerds are downloading and
  > installing Google Chrome
  Right, but how did they find out that it even exists to go download? This was the major problem Mozilla and Firefox faced initially, and that's where the huge marketing campaign really helps.
Netscape monopoly was bad too by yuhong · 2011-03-31 16:36 · Score: 1

Yes the IE6 monopoly was bad for the web, but people forget that the Netscape monopoly from 1995 or so was bad too. It for example killed HTML 3.0 (which existed even before Netscape as HTML+), and delayed CSS adoption for years (the first draft of CSS dates back to around the time Netscape 0.9 was released) in favor of tags like <FONT> and <CENTER>.
1. Re:Netscape monopoly was bad too by yuhong · 2011-03-31 17:09 · Score: 1
  
  It did exist in HTML 3.0 drafts, and while it was not supported in Netscape 0.9. Netscape soon afterwards implemented it.
2. Re:Netscape monopoly was bad too by yuhong · 2011-04-01 07:46 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, Mosaic/Netscape did not gain a monopoly using any illegal way. It don't change the fact that it was still bad for the web though.
Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by ackthpt · 2011-03-31 16:41 · Score: 3, Interesting

Microsoft should have been split into 3 companies, but when George W. Bush rolled into Washington DC, he viewed every Clinton move as garbage and disregarded it. Really would have been a good thing for Microsoft, in the long run, one of the three was bound to ditch the crappy OS and build a better one without all the legacy garbage and bundling everyone's products for free.

--

A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
1. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by Black+Parrot · 2011-03-31 17:10 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  but when George W. Bush rolled into Washington DC, he viewed the rule of law as garbage and disregarded it.
  There; I've fixed it for you.
  
  --
  Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
2. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by Archangel+Michael · 2011-03-31 17:10 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I blame Microsoft for creating a marketplace that made Linux popular. Yes, one of the biggest reasons why Linux became successful, especially on the server market, was because there was no viable alternative. That created the opening that allowed Linus' creation to grown and be nurtured for years completely ignored by Redmond. It was too small, and wasn't a threat. It was a toy, just a college kid's cute experiment.
  Then the internet bubble hit, and it was expensive Netscape Server or Less Expensive IIS, and the pesky upstart OS and Apache, both FREE (libre, gratis), Small ISPs who couldn't afford Unix or Windows NT servers started using it. And against all odds, it became popular. Holes were patched quickly as they were found, showing how nimble Open Source Code could be, and better than proprietary code that was constantly being hacked while websites waited for updates from the vendors.
  I know, I was there, in one of those ISPs (Yay Slackware). Since then, I've done Debian, SuSE, RedHat, Yellowdog, Ubuntu and a couple roll your own distros. I credit, almost entirely, the monoculture that was Microsoft, for the rise of Linux. Not because I like Microsoft, but rather because I can look back and see the utter apathy that the monoculture rested upon.
  
  --
  Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
3. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by bmo · 2011-03-31 18:39 · Score: 1
  
  And from an investor point of view, Microsoft is worth more broken up into its constituent parts than as a whole. Entire forests of deadwood.
  "Lion Food" in the Jargon File is out of date. It should be Microsoft managers now.
  --
  BMO
4. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by doktor-hladnjak · 2011-03-31 18:48 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Don't forget the implications of the BSD/AT&T lawsuit in the early 90s on the rise of Linux. Even Linus himself has admitted that had 386/BSD been available to him (i.e., not caught up in a major lawsuit which delayed development and release of other BSD derivatives), he probably would have never written Linux.
5. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by drsmithy · 2011-03-31 19:03 · Score: 2
  
  I credit, almost entirely, the monoculture that was Microsoft, for the rise of Linux.
  Really ? Because it's not like Linux was being used for tasks that Windows would frequently have been seriously considered for.
  Linux was displacing commercial UNIX systems (Solaris, et al). Windows was displacing Novell servers in SMBs. These are mostly distinct and separate markets.
6. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by ShoulderOfOrion · 2011-03-31 19:15 · Score: 1
  
  What drove me to Linux back in the late '90s was the increasingly expensive software development environment. They killed off all the inexpensive $10-$99 C/C++ compiler vendors, then ratcheted up the cost of Visual Studio to the point where hobbyists, individual programmers, et al, couldn't afford it. Not to mention the outrageous MSDN subscription fees. When it became obvious that only corporate developers were welcome to code for Windows, I ditched it and haven't looked back.
7. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by devent · 2011-03-31 19:32 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Funny, because this "legacy garbage" is the only reason why Windows is still so popular. In addition, the "legacy garbage" (aka ActiveX, ask the people in South Korea why they can't use anything but IE. http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/09/21/update-on-the-cost-of-monoculture-in-korea/ ).
  How about they build a new Windows, without the 'legacy garbage' and every mom and pop need to buy all the software they all love and use again for no reason other than the older version doesn't run on the new Windows?
  Would be nice if Windows would start to compete with other systems on fair grounds and not how well Windows application can be run on the different systems (which no matter how well your system is, Windows will always run Windows applications better).
  After decades we finally have somewhat of a fair ground where Microsoft Office needs to compete on fair grounds and not how well the office suites can open and save Microsoft Office documents. But of course that move was undermined by Microsoft with their OOXML format.
  Yes, Microsoft should have been split up and the new companies should have been under control by the feds. Further, the APIs and the document formats should be opened up, for Wine, Samba, and OpenOffice. The judgment did in fact nothing at all and you can see how well the governmentcooperation relationship is doing.
  
  --
  http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
8. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by loosescrews · 2011-03-31 19:51 · Score: 2
  
  Have you ever used a clean install of Windows? I don't think you will find anyone else's products bundled with it. Sure, Sony will bundle a bunch of crap with their computer, but that isn't Microsoft, that is Sony.
  
  As others have said, the main reason that Windows is so popular is that it has great legacy support. In fact, I find it a refreshing change compared to Apple who completely changed platforms requiring everything to be recompiled. Now that is fragmentation.
9. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by KiloByte · 2011-03-31 21:53 · Score: 1
  
  George W. Bush [..] viewed the rule of law as garbage
  You mean, like most of recent US presidents? Clinton was half-decent, but Obama is Dubya-level bad.
  Although we shouldn't single out the US too, it's a popular thing all around the world.
  
  --
  The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
10. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by robmv · 2011-03-31 22:54 · Score: 1
  
  The same Apple did with Mac OS X, emulating OS 9 and deprecating old APIs gradually
11. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by devent · 2011-03-31 23:40 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, would work, if there were only a fraction of Windows applications out there, like on the Mac. And If Windows would only be run on a few hardware components.
  
  --
  http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
12. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by jank1887 · 2011-04-01 00:04 · Score: 1
  
  > and the new companies should have been under control by the feds
  you had me up until that point.
13. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by robmv · 2011-04-01 00:51 · Score: 1
  
  Why is hardware an issue?, do Windows 95 drivers work on Windows 7?, regular people do not upgrade Windows over old hardware, they buy new hardware with Windows. Probably upgrades are more common on corporate computers, if you have some business application that require some special hardware then continue using your old Windows because it will be supported, oh wait that is happening right now with Windows XP, and if you do not have plans to upgrade your applications in 10 years of support of the old OS, please that company deserve to be owned by every security bug the old vendors left behind
  On the software side, with today computers and virtualization it is easy to run your old applications. MS do not want to do it because they are slow to react to anything and in order to build a new foundation for your OS it is required to do react fast to the difficulties you will find, MS knows they can not do that right now, but do not make it sounds like it is impossible
14. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by jedidiah · 2011-04-01 01:29 · Score: 1
  
  Back in the day, people that were accustomed to the WinDOS desktop monopoly desperately wanted to extend that to the server room but were unable to. The product simply wasn't up to the task. NT was in fact built and marketed as a "Unix killer".
  The idea that Microsoft had nothing to offer the crowd that's prone to run Unix is just self serving historical revisionism.
  In fact, being able to ditch WinDOS for NT in those days made the Windows desktop experience a lot more bearable.
  Microsoft's engineering mediocrity led to the creation of Linux and helped create the gap that Linux could grow to fill.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
15. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by Locutus · 2011-04-01 03:06 · Score: 1
  
  yes, it was the career politician John Ashcroft who was appointed US Attorney General under the G W Bush regime and immediately called for taking Judge Jackson off the case. What I always found interesting about that particular anti-trust case was that the Judge appointed to the case, by luck of the draw, turned out to be the same Judge who was told to settle the previous case some 8 years earlier. So this Justice knew from previous experience what tricks Microsoft played and how they got away with one and were sent off with a slap on the wrist for contractually tying their OS software to computer hardware sales. I'm sure he was none too pleased when time after time MS executives showed to be hostile witnesses and in court showed their same shenanigans by with faked videos claimed to be live and untouched evidence. He found them guilty and let them have it by ordered them split up but once again, the Judge on the case was removed and another Judge handed the case with what sure seemed like orders to make it go away without harm to Microsoft.
  
  Thank you John Ashcroft and GW Bush for fucking up yet another thing.
  
  LoB
  
  --
  "Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
16. Re:Should have been 3 Baby Microsofts by Black+Parrot · 2011-04-01 04:20 · Score: 1
  
  but Obama is Dubya-level bad.
  Be serious. Look at everything he has done to prosecute war criminals, to prosecute the people and censure the corporations who collaborated in illegal wiretapping, to close the Guantanamo Bay gulag, to end US adventurism in the Middle East, to stop the undeclared Drone Wars against the people of Pakistan, to ensure that we consistently intervene in humanitarian crises without regard to the presence of oil or the color of said humans' skin, - well, the list just goes on and on!
  
  --
  Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As a former Opera developer during that era by LostMyBeaver · 2011-03-31 19:02 · Score: 4, Interesting

I have to say that Netscape was our best friend. Their code has become such crap that it gave us the chance to not only catch up, but to run free.

Frankly, the lawsuit mentioned was one of the worst things ever to happen to many other companies. Mac, Linux and everyone else was completely left without a browser capable of performing online banking, reading news sites etc... The lawsuit caused Netscape to become a litigation company and their development just fell to pieces. Their server packages were amazingly bad and the day they added Javascript support and "layers" to their browser, everything just fell to pieces.

That left it up to us to come in and make waves. We became "the other browser" sure, our market share at the time sucked. Lars Knoll was still working on the first release of his amazing code.... imagine a browser written in such a way that the code was readable and manageable. But, what it really came down to is, Netscape's focus on litigation damn near ruined the entire computer market for anyone that wasn't willing to simply just become another Microsoft shop.

You want to know what REALLY killed BeOS? It was Netscape. We were too small to make the BeOS version, so we used a small Swedish company run by a group of incredibly bright and talented developers. Even now, years after Opera bought that company, the VP of engineering is the guy who ran that group, the guys making the screaming fast rendering contexts and other technologies which keep Opera in the top two at all times really has a lot to do with those guys. But, we just didn't have the resources to do it back then. As a result, Be would either have to make their own browser (they didn't have the manpower or inclination) or Netscape could have made one. But, without a reasonable browser, users had to reboot their machine into Windows to be able to run IE or Netscape to surf the web.

The world has changed... you can port FireFox or WebKit to a new platform in days (for a crap build, but still functional), if you can interest Opera (which typically isn't hard to do) they can port to a new platform as quickly as they can write a handful of classes and a new Makefile. The reason IE has lost market share isn't because the lawsuit did anything, it's because the other browsers are all equal to or better than IE.

That said, WebKit has become so good as of late that if Microsoft didn't have to support all the IE infrastructure that they do, switching to WebKit would be a great idea for them. Oh... well, there is another catch to that. If they did that, the whole world would be in an uproar complaining about how Microsoft is trying to be WebKit by absorbing it etc...

I don't think however that Microsoft is bothering to compete with other browsers anymore. Their developers have a competitive spirit and should, and they should be proud of what they manage to accomplish, but Microsoft doesn't really benefit at all from competing with other browser now. What's the market case for it? Really, there are now 3 great browsers on Windows (Opera, Chrome, FireFox) and Internet Explorer. They are all getting faster and faster, getting more features, the standard web can now do most of what needs to be done without non-standard extensions, in 5 more years, the web standards might even be as capable as Flash Player. There will always be a need for plug-ins if for no other reason but DRM. But, let's face it, Silverlight was proof that Microsoft isn't trying to alter the basics of the web anymore. They're not trying to make new Microsoft only extensions to the standards, but instead decided that a plug-in which could be run on all browsers would be good enough instead.

Oh, and Chrome and others let you even choose Bing and stuff over Google if you choose to. So, Microsoft still makes their money no matter what browser you use, even if it's Safari (why would anyone use that?) on Mac with Bing.

So, the business case for competing with the other browser vendors is just not there anymore. Internet Explorer is just another p
1. Re:As a former Opera developer during that era by Leekle2ManE · 2011-04-01 01:20 · Score: 1
  
  Your loss. It was a good read.
2. Re:As a former Opera developer during that era by yuhong · 2011-04-02 20:00 · Score: 1
  
  I mean, they pretty much just bought Nokia without even paying for them
  Actually when they did finally make the deal it was reported that they did pay them. And it is not new. MS did something similar to Corel in 1999 or so.
3. Re:As a former Opera developer during that era by yuhong · 2011-04-02 20:01 · Score: 1
  
  And don't forget the Gecko rewrite which took Netscape years to become usable and in the meantime they were stuck on 4.x.
4. Re:As a former Opera developer during that era by yuhong · 2011-04-03 10:17 · Score: 1
  
  I already asked on Quora about it:
  http://www.quora.com/What-would-Netscape-5-0-Mariner-be-like-if-it-was-actually-finished-and-released
The settlement did its job?!?! by Tracy+Reed · 2011-03-31 19:41 · Score: 2

"Although Netscape ultimately didn't benefit, the settlement seems to have done its job"
Sure, so much competition was restored to the browser market by the settlement that Mozilla/Firefox had to be built FOR FREE by thousands of people and then given away FOR FREE for TEN YEARS to get where we are now!
Re:Hairyfeet, why did you make us all LAUGH @ you? by Inda · 2011-03-31 21:32 · Score: 1

Fuck yeah AC! You tell him!

Did he also shit on your pillow?

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IE vs Something by alphatel · 2011-03-31 21:59 · Score: 4, Insightful

This was a poor anti-trust suit which didn't address the real problem at the time - Microsoft giving OEMs rebates for NOT installing other OSes. IE had very little to do with the bad practices at MS. In the interim, yes Google really has been much more anti-competitive in a myriad of ways, but nothing as prominent as Intel paying to NOT have AMD chips or Ma Bell charging you more because they owned everything.

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When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Hey hey. by unity100 · 2011-04-01 00:33 · Score: 1

Settlement did nothing. Mozilla gained its share with nails and tooth, and actually it was Eu that struck the biggest blow to microsoft skullduggery with browser ballot box.

You know, the antitrust case in Eu that did NOT stagnate, and expire.

Ironically, in usa, case stagnated and is now expiring. Tells a lot about u.s. justice system.

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come oooooon by unity100 · 2011-04-01 00:39 · Score: 1

geocities, blink, comet cursor, center-aligned pages -> these were all part of our web culture back then.

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wow by unity100 · 2011-04-01 00:40 · Score: 1

what the hell is that ...

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Re:Enough with the Bill Gates icon by jedidiah · 2011-04-01 01:32 · Score: 1

They should dress Steve Jobs up as Cardinal Richeleu or Woolsey.
Although the BBS era Bill Gates icon still quite effectively captures the essence of the company and the user community. Besides the fact that it highlights an inconvenient truth, there's really no reason to change it.
Oddly enough, this would mean putting a red hat on Steve...

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Re:Enough with the Bill Gates icon by Anonymous Coward · 2011-04-01 01:45 · Score: 1

Can we start spelling apple with the Euro symbol as the E?
Google on the Microsoft Desktop by doperative · 2011-04-01 02:49 · Score: 1

> Microsoft, of course, filed its own antitrust action against Google this week, and even commented publicly on the irony of its doing so, noting that Microsoft has 'spent more than a decade wearing the shoe on the other foot.'"
How is what Google does equivilent to Microsoft strongarming the OEMS to make iExplorer the default browser on the desktop, coercing the OEMs into removing third party browsers, hacking the API to make using third party browsers a jolting experience etc ...
This pisses me off by Anonymous Coward · 2011-04-01 02:59 · Score: 1

Because Ubuntu, OS X, almost EVERY other OS distribution includes their own choice of browser while Chrome OS of course forces you to use Chrome to browse the Internet.
Sure, Microsoft has had its shared of deceptive business practices in the past and has paid dearly for it, but shipping a browser with an OS is the only logical solution, otherwise, how would anybody obtain another browser if they have no internet access on their machine? Firefox, Chrome, Opera, most OTHER browsers owe their market share to the fact that IE shipped with Windows, even if its fired up once to get the OTHER browser. Sure you could make a command line feature to grab packages like *nix, however Microsoft has strove to move the average person away from command line retardedness.
This lawsuit was initiated at a time when most lawmakers were (or still are) completely ignorant of Internet technology. Forward 10 years and look at all the supposed anti-trust lawsuits you could file. Apple excludes the use of Flash, 3rd party dev tools, and installs Safari by default on iOS, Google builds an OS off of Chrome precluding the use of any other browser, Ubuntu pre-installs FireFox and a slew of other open source software, largely without choice, this list goes on.
If you want to push antitrust laws then do it without discrimination; do not just target the biggest company at the time. How about enforce a law that all browsers should be removed from every OS product out there, and see how long it takes for lawmakers to realize how stupid that law is.
If you can't compete, because you create an inferior product, then don't bitch and whine about the other guy making more money, make your product better.
A stacked deck by Brian+Kendig · 2011-04-01 03:17 · Score: 3, Informative

For all of you who are pointing out, with some rightness, that Netscape Communicator 4 had quality issues - let me remind you of something.
This was the time period when Microsoft had decided to, as a Microsoft executive stated during the antitrust trial, "cut off [Netscape's] air supply". For each product Netscape was trying to make money on - web servers, proxy servers, ecommerce solutions - Microsoft was giving away a workalike product for free, funded with the earnings from Microsoft Windows.
And, at the same time, Microsoft was forcing its OEM partners to keep Netscape Communicator off the computers they sold. Any company that refused would no longer get volume licensing discounts on Windows, which would then price their computers out of the market.
So Netscape was starved for cash at the same time as it had to put in a lot of effort to keep up with the extremely-well-funded Internet Explorer. There was no way that Netscape could have survived, much less competed, against this.
1. Re:A stacked deck by man_of_mr_e · 2011-04-01 08:00 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, and after they destroyed netscape, they raised the price of Internet explorer and IIS. Right?
  More than a decade later and all that stuff is still included in the OS at no extra cost. That would seem to indicate that there is no market for browsers or web servers. Otherwise, they would have started charging for them by now.
  I mean, come off it. Regardless of what people say "in the heat of battle", it doesn't change the fact that there was no opportunity to make money anyways.
  
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2. Re:A stacked deck by alphatel · 2011-04-01 19:18 · Score: 1
  
  This was the time period when Microsoft had decided to, as a Microsoft executive stated during the antitrust trial, "cut off [Netscape's] air supply".
  
  So anytime a US company tries to beat another US company at the same game, that's anti-trust? I think that's actually the definition of competitive.
  
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  When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Re:wow by matt_gaia · 2011-04-01 03:33 · Score: 2

what the hell is that ...
That's a perfect reason why you shouldn't start drinking until at least 9AM. YMMV
WGA has driven Linux adoption? by judeancodersfront · 2011-04-01 05:16 · Score: 1

WGA has merely driven crackers to break it.

Most geeks run Windows. Most Slashdotters run Windows. There is no growing group of disenfranchised technical elite. I'm really tired of all the wishful thinking here when it comes to Linux. Maybe it is time to admit that Linux has problems and needs some work before it can gain popularity as a desktop system.
Re:wow by sznupi · 2011-04-01 05:18 · Score: 1

Conveniently, a poster with appropriate sig in one of current Hot Comment threads... http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2063320&cid=35682626

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One that hath name thou can not otter
Re:Must be using a different IE by PyroMosh · 2011-04-01 18:09 · Score: 1

I may not agree with you, but you at least made sense up until you mentioned "the folks behind Firefox". Do you understand who that is? What would that even mean?

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Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Web browser history by Cable · 2011-04-02 16:38 · Score: 1

Netscape was one company claiming antitrust against Microsoft. Anyone remember the Network Computer? Anyone, anyone, anyone? Sun, Oracle, Netscape and so on? The NC was supported to take over Microsoft's market, wasn't it?
Netscape was not the only web browser, remember Lynx, Spyglass, Mosaic and others. It makes me conCERNed about some people who forget how the WWW (world wide web) and hypertext (Xanadu) came to be developed.
If Microsoft gives up Internet Explorer, what are the bot nets and spammers going to do for a living? :)
Competition is a good thing, Microsoft should understand that by now. Other web browsers like Opera, Safari, Chrome/Chromium, and others help compete instead of just Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation.