The free market operates on enlightened self interest. Everyone acts selfishly and it ends up benefitting everyone. Education is a part of that, but you are failing to understand how monopolies can undermine that. It is, right now, in the best self interests of many people to use IE. That's not a lack of education, they just need to be able to access their online banking. Companies need to be able to run WEb applications designed to only work with IE and that is currently in their own best interests. It's not that they're stupid. MS has built artificial problems with competing browsers by creating an ecosystem of noncompliant pages... and they did it intentionally not caring that it was holding back the Web and crushing progress.
Since this appears to be the main point of your post, I shall respond to it first. We seem to have an egg and the chicken problem here. Which appeared first? The Web in general and websites, or in this particular case, IE? What is stopping those banks to make their websites standards compliant? I know that the majority of their users, almost all of them, are using IE. But if the banks in the first place coded their sites to be standards compliant, we would not be in this situation. Ditto for the rest of the web. Laziness of web developers attributed to a great extent to Microsoft's current position as a monopoly.
Reporting a criminal offense is whining now? Other ways of punishing, we don't even know how they plan on punishing MS, just speculation. But do tell, how would you restore competition such that all browsers will succeed or fail on their own merits while undoing the damage MS as done to the market and restoring innovation?
No reporting a crime is not whining, but demanding they provide your products alongside theirs is. I agree with you, though, that this all is still speculation and that we do not know for sure on how they plan to punish them. As I have stated earlier, education goes a long way. Look at Firefox. It is steadily eating away IE's market share, and users are each they more and more aware of the alternatives.
Why should thieves pay fines larger than what they stole? To help fix the problem including restoring things to the way they were.
Sometimes it is impossible to restore things to the way they were. No matter how big a sentence the killer serves, or how much you fine him, nothing will compensate for your loss. A large enough fine in this case and an order to behave in the future is more appropriate in this case.
Note: I am not saying that a murder and creating a monopoly are anywhere in the same league, I'm just trying to prove a point here.
They didn't commit any crime. But honestly, doesn't this seem just a little bit like whining from the other companies? There are other ways Microsoft could and should be punished.
It's silly to make criminals stop breaking the law and to punish them?
Again, it is not silly to punish them generally, it's just that this particular form of punishment is silly. Punishment should fit the crime. In my opinion, this punishment does not fit the crime. As some have suggested, I think that breaking up Microsoft into smaller, less connected entities would work very well. Why should they provide competing products? Look at the situation with iPod? Do you think Apple has a monopoly in the portable music player industry?
You seem to be failing to understand how monopolies undermine free trade and destroy innovation and why there are laws prohibiting such actions. Notice the state of Web technologies implemented on the Web and compare them to a decade ago. Isn't it strange how there has been so slow of progress in such an important and ubiquitous high tech industry. Do you think that is normal or desirable? Do you want it to continue to stagnate?
Educating users about the benefits of open source project (and generally teaching them critical thinking, so that they can, for themselves, choose the better product) would give much better results. Microsoft created a large mess with their non-compliant browser and other bad software. However, it is the lack of knowledge and education of the users that's inadvertently supporting it. No one is stopping you to download an alternative browser as soon as you install the OS. But, a large percentage of users either is not aware of the alternatives, or does not know how to get to them. Is this also Microsoft's fault?
Just to play the devil's advocate here a little bit. Let MSFT Do that, but also mandate that Mozilla, Opera, Sun and others offer downloads of IE, MS Office and other suites alongside their downloads. Yes, Microsoft has created a monopoly, yes they broke the law, but this is just plain silly. I mean, Ubuntu comes with Firefox preinstalled, could you say that Mozilla has monopoly on most default Ubuntu installation, the kind average users usually go for? Firing up apt-get and downloading and installing new browser in Linux is not much simpler than firing up IE and downloading Opera, Firefox, Safari and others..
Just my 2 euro cents...
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Excellent version, I would just like to know is there a way to copy my extensions from my local installation?
Not exactly, some games appear on torrents a few days before the actual release of the official version. See Mass Effect 2 or Spore.
Nope, no new file system as far as I know in Windows 7.
The free market operates on enlightened self interest. Everyone acts selfishly and it ends up benefitting everyone. Education is a part of that, but you are failing to understand how monopolies can undermine that. It is, right now, in the best self interests of many people to use IE. That's not a lack of education, they just need to be able to access their online banking. Companies need to be able to run WEb applications designed to only work with IE and that is currently in their own best interests. It's not that they're stupid. MS has built artificial problems with competing browsers by creating an ecosystem of noncompliant pages... and they did it intentionally not caring that it was holding back the Web and crushing progress.
Since this appears to be the main point of your post, I shall respond to it first. We seem to have an egg and the chicken problem here. Which appeared first? The Web in general and websites, or in this particular case, IE? What is stopping those banks to make their websites standards compliant? I know that the majority of their users, almost all of them, are using IE. But if the banks in the first place coded their sites to be standards compliant, we would not be in this situation. Ditto for the rest of the web. Laziness of web developers attributed to a great extent to Microsoft's current position as a monopoly.
Reporting a criminal offense is whining now? Other ways of punishing, we don't even know how they plan on punishing MS, just speculation. But do tell, how would you restore competition such that all browsers will succeed or fail on their own merits while undoing the damage MS as done to the market and restoring innovation?
No reporting a crime is not whining, but demanding they provide your products alongside theirs is. I agree with you, though, that this all is still speculation and that we do not know for sure on how they plan to punish them. As I have stated earlier, education goes a long way. Look at Firefox. It is steadily eating away IE's market share, and users are each they more and more aware of the alternatives.
Why should thieves pay fines larger than what they stole? To help fix the problem including restoring things to the way they were.
Sometimes it is impossible to restore things to the way they were. No matter how big a sentence the killer serves, or how much you fine him, nothing will compensate for your loss. A large enough fine in this case and an order to behave in the future is more appropriate in this case. Note: I am not saying that a murder and creating a monopoly are anywhere in the same league, I'm just trying to prove a point here.
Why, what crime did they commit?
They didn't commit any crime. But honestly, doesn't this seem just a little bit like whining from the other companies? There are other ways Microsoft could and should be punished.
It's silly to make criminals stop breaking the law and to punish them?
Again, it is not silly to punish them generally, it's just that this particular form of punishment is silly. Punishment should fit the crime. In my opinion, this punishment does not fit the crime. As some have suggested, I think that breaking up Microsoft into smaller, less connected entities would work very well. Why should they provide competing products? Look at the situation with iPod? Do you think Apple has a monopoly in the portable music player industry?
You seem to be failing to understand how monopolies undermine free trade and destroy innovation and why there are laws prohibiting such actions. Notice the state of Web technologies implemented on the Web and compare them to a decade ago. Isn't it strange how there has been so slow of progress in such an important and ubiquitous high tech industry. Do you think that is normal or desirable? Do you want it to continue to stagnate?
Educating users about the benefits of open source project (and generally teaching them critical thinking, so that they can, for themselves, choose the better product) would give much better results. Microsoft created a large mess with their non-compliant browser and other bad software. However, it is the lack of knowledge and education of the users that's inadvertently supporting it. No one is stopping you to download an alternative browser as soon as you install the OS. But, a large percentage of users either is not aware of the alternatives, or does not know how to get to them. Is this also Microsoft's fault?
Just to play the devil's advocate here a little bit. Let MSFT Do that, but also mandate that Mozilla, Opera, Sun and others offer downloads of IE, MS Office and other suites alongside their downloads. Yes, Microsoft has created a monopoly, yes they broke the law, but this is just plain silly. I mean, Ubuntu comes with Firefox preinstalled, could you say that Mozilla has monopoly on most default Ubuntu installation, the kind average users usually go for? Firing up apt-get and downloading and installing new browser in Linux is not much simpler than firing up IE and downloading Opera, Firefox, Safari and others.. Just my 2 euro cents...