Well, this might work for young unmarried developers with little work experience, but try to convince your wife that you are doing everything you can to get a job while programming open source projects for free.
"Only if you think having a majority market share is the only important issue, and not servicing anyone else, not making development easy, not making things work properly, not pushing technology forward, and not providing a superior product."
I'm looking at it from the perspective of a business and its customers. If some individuals or companies want to eliminate support for IE and thus greatly reduce the number of people who can see their content, that's their own choice.
"Are you really saying that the capabilities (or lack thereof) of web browsers has no effect on web services? Can you explain?"
Yes and Yes. Web services are machine-to-machine interactions over a network. See http://www.w3.org/TR/ws-gloss/ and check out the definition of "web service".
"You're overly broad statement is attempting to say that anti-trust actions are from the government, and the government is bad, therefore anti-trust actions are bad."
Actually, No. I was just pointing out that any particular action by government isn't necessarily motivated by the principles the government was based on.
"Third, you've completely failed to address the anti-trust action on it's own merits, which have been gone over and over and over in thousands of slashdot articles."
I had to laugh at this one. It reminds me of this scene in Star Trek 4
"Nobody understands you in this century unless you swear every other word. You'll find it in all the literature of the era: Jackelyn Susann, the novels of Harrold Robbins." -- Kirk "Ah, the giants." -- Spock
There are no roadblocks to overcome, just different implementations. Political-correctness aside, a smart small player would target IE first since it has the largest market share by far. I'm not aware of any serious players large or small that "threw in the towel" over having to support IE.
Of course, web services aren't really about browsers anyway, so IE isn't really a factor there.
"No matter how, it is a known fact and an integral part of the whole "free market" and "capitalism" and pretty much every serious economic theory, that monopolies are bad for everyone except the monopolist, and as such must be avoided or if they appear, strictly limited."
For example, if AT&T had not been a monopoly, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie wouldn't have had the freedom to play around with operating systems because management would want them to work on things that directly helped AT&T compete in the crowded telecommunications marketplace.
Well, there may certainly be some lightweight players who aren't willing to do what it takes to make things work, but the serious ones always do.
Of course this begs the question that web services really provide some unique value that couldn't otherwise be offered, but that's an argument for a different day.
These are just technical details that can be worked out. They aren't making it impossible to do business. Nobody except developers care about the geek level issues.
The most serious and strongest case against MS was the OEM contracts. But because the DOJ was in bed with companies like Sun and AOL/Netscape, a lot of energy went into the issues of Java and the Netscape browser which were weaker and less important issues.
The result: Sun and AOL were able to leverage the DOJ case and get MS to pay them off and the OEM contracts were required to be a bit less restrictive, but not much better. How did the consumer really benefit from this?
These cases should be the result of independent investigation and not driven by competitors with deep pockets.
"The web browser has a much bigger and more direct impact on communications and commerce than something like Notepad."
Well, I don't think an individual browser has all that much impact on communications and commerce. I'm not aware of any major browser that prevents people from freely expressing their opinion or keeps them from doing business on the web.
Well, that argument goes both ways. If there were no competitors to IE you wouldn't have to spend all those man hours getting to work on other browsers.
AT&T was a monopoly that was an order of magnitude greater than any MS had. They owned the phones (customers rented them), all the infrastructure and all local and long distance service.
For MS to be like AT&T they'd have to make and control all hardware from mainframes to PCs, all OSs and all application software.
"Yeah, I'm sure enforcing the same laws they enforce against everyone else must seem like a political game if you live in a country where MS gives huge amounts of money to politicians and those same politicians make sure laws aren't enforced against MS."
You've got it backwards. MS lost out because they weren't contributing money to the politicians and many of their competitors did. The antitrust case was a "reminder" that they have to pay their protection money. MS got the "message" and now they do contribute.
Do you wonder why people are still talking about whether Ticketmaster should be investigated as a monopoly many years after it was obvious they were one? They had exclusive deals with venues that didn't allow those venues to contract with other ticket companies. Sound familiar?
You can bet if Ticketmaster had been competing with the likes of IBM, Sun and Oracle, they would be in MS's position today.
So don't give us that "enforcing the same laws they enforce against everyone else" crap.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just a different social contract than the "winner take all" approach we have in the US.
Most employers aren't interested in seeing your code unless you have little experience.
"I completely agree with you, I remember the days when people thought "with open source, will jobs suffer?".
Are you implying that that question has been resolved?
Well, this might work for young unmarried developers with little work experience, but try to convince your wife that you are doing everything you can to get a job while programming open source projects for free.
"Only if you think having a majority market share is the only important issue, and not servicing anyone else, not making development easy, not making things work properly, not pushing technology forward, and not providing a superior product."
I'm looking at it from the perspective of a business and its customers. If some individuals or companies want to eliminate support for IE and thus greatly reduce the number of people who can see their content, that's their own choice.
"Are you really saying that the capabilities (or lack thereof) of web browsers has no effect on web services? Can you explain?"
Yes and Yes. Web services are machine-to-machine interactions over a network. See http://www.w3.org/TR/ws-gloss/ and check out the definition of "web service".
Get back to us when the US missile defense system has actually destroyed a foreign missile (assuming that Slashdot is still around then).
"You're overly broad statement is attempting to say that anti-trust actions are from the government, and the government is bad, therefore anti-trust actions are bad."
Actually, No. I was just pointing out that any particular action by government isn't necessarily motivated by the principles the government was based on.
"Third, you've completely failed to address the anti-trust action on it's own merits, which have been gone over and over and over in thousands of slashdot articles."
I had to laugh at this one. It reminds me of this scene in Star Trek 4
"Nobody understands you in this century unless you swear every other word. You'll find it in all the literature of the era: Jackelyn Susann, the novels of Harrold Robbins." -- Kirk
"Ah, the giants." -- Spock
Thanks for the strawman argument.
There are no roadblocks to overcome, just different implementations. Political-correctness aside, a smart small player would target IE first since it has the largest market share by far. I'm not aware of any serious players large or small that "threw in the towel" over having to support IE.
Of course, web services aren't really about browsers anyway, so IE isn't really a factor there.
Historically however, government agencies have been rather vague about what exactly MS would have to do to comply with an order to remove IE.
"No matter how, it is a known fact and an integral part of the whole "free market" and "capitalism" and pretty much every serious economic theory, that monopolies are bad for everyone except the monopolist, and as such must be avoided or if they appear, strictly limited."
For example, if AT&T had not been a monopoly, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie wouldn't have had the freedom to play around with operating systems because management would want them to work on things that directly helped AT&T compete in the crowded telecommunications marketplace.
Well, there may certainly be some lightweight players who aren't willing to do what it takes to make things work, but the serious ones always do.
Of course this begs the question that web services really provide some unique value that couldn't otherwise be offered, but that's an argument for a different day.
Sometimes the truth is written by Trolls as well.
I suspect that the EU wouldn't accept that. I don't think they want any solution that doesn't keep MS on the hot seat.
These are just technical details that can be worked out. They aren't making it impossible to do business. Nobody except developers care about the geek level issues.
The problem is the way they are enforced.
The most serious and strongest case against MS was the OEM contracts. But because the DOJ was in bed with companies like Sun and AOL/Netscape, a lot of energy went into the issues of Java and the Netscape browser which were weaker and less important issues.
The result: Sun and AOL were able to leverage the DOJ case and get MS to pay them off and the OEM contracts were required to be a bit less restrictive, but not much better. How did the consumer really benefit from this?
These cases should be the result of independent investigation and not driven by competitors with deep pockets.
IIS has never been all that dependent on IE and MS has been making IE less and less relevant to the server side in recent years.
I don't know anyone outside of "joe sixpacks" who think or claimed that Microsoft created the computer market.
The Gem Desktop ran on top of DOS, like thousands of other programs. The marketplace killed it.
"Except Apple makes the whole device.
That is the critical difference."
Actually, making the whole device would make a potential monopoly stronger, not weaker.
"The web browser has a much bigger and more direct impact on communications and commerce than something like Notepad."
Well, I don't think an individual browser has all that much impact on communications and commerce. I'm not aware of any major browser that prevents people from freely expressing their opinion or keeps them from doing business on the web.
Sure, but to the extent that they don't work correctly, they undermine the ability for our society to function properly.
BTW, I don't think capitalism is fundamentally about freedom in a broad sense.
Well, that argument goes both ways. If there were no competitors to IE you wouldn't have to spend all those man hours getting to work on other browsers.
"Anti-trust is exactly about the consumer."
In the same sense that government is exactly about helping people. Unfortunately, in both cases, the theory and practice are not the same.
AT&T was a monopoly that was an order of magnitude greater than any MS had. They owned the phones (customers rented them), all the infrastructure and all local and long distance service.
For MS to be like AT&T they'd have to make and control all hardware from mainframes to PCs, all OSs and all application software.
"Yeah, I'm sure enforcing the same laws they enforce against everyone else must seem like a political game if you live in a country where MS gives huge amounts of money to politicians and those same politicians make sure laws aren't enforced against MS."
You've got it backwards. MS lost out because they weren't contributing money to the politicians and many of their competitors did. The antitrust case was a "reminder" that they have to pay their protection money. MS got the "message" and now they do contribute.
Do you wonder why people are still talking about whether Ticketmaster should be investigated as a monopoly many years after it was obvious they were one? They had exclusive deals with venues that didn't allow those venues to contract with other ticket companies. Sound familiar?
You can bet if Ticketmaster had been competing with the likes of IBM, Sun and Oracle, they would be in MS's position today.
So don't give us that "enforcing the same laws they enforce against everyone else" crap.
phones aren't computers perhaps?