You get in lawyers and market experts to advise you. This is what any sensible large company does - they have major legal departments.
However, there are no independent, objective metrics. A company cannot know whether or not it is a monopoly until a court tells it.
Of course not! Bundling is not a matter of improving their product in anyway - it is a marketing strategy; a matter of getting the foot in the door first by being pre-installed.
How many popular, mainstream software products can you think of that *haven't* improved themselves via the "bundling" of features found in other software ?
How many other OSes can you name that *don't* come with "media players, etc" ? If a competitor improves its product via the integration (or "bundling", if you prefer) of certain functionaly (eg: a media player) then how can a company in a "monopoly" position similarly improve their product without being ruled abusive ?
Answer: they cannot.
To be on an equal footing in line with competitors products the extra features the media player etc. could be supplied extra on additional CDs with competitor's versions, or obtained through downloading (just like a competitors).
And if none of the competitor's products provided sufficient/equivalent functionality ? How can a company in a monopoly position provide *better* (or even equivalent) functionality than their competitors ? They cannot, because by doing so they will be considered "abusive".
Or, as I said, a company in a "monopoly" can no longer compete, nor deliver new features - in line with competitor's products - to its customers, because it will be considered "abusive".
Don't be silly. Of course you can keep your products at feature-parity.
No, you cannot. Because every feature that a competitor has which a third party may also be capable of providing - if implemented by you - is an "abuse" of a "monopoly".
The point is not to pre-install features which competitors are attempting to provide. This means things like media players, virus checkers, etc.
So why did (and does) the same logic not apply to CPU schedulers, network stacks, memory management, hardware drivers, widget sets, text editors, calculators, disk repair tools, compression tools, backup utilities, shells, GUIs, etc, etc.
All these features have, at some time in the past, been provided by "competitors" to DOS and Windows (many still are). All have since been "bundled" into Windows. No-one seems to get too hung up on the fact Windows "bundles" notepad, a disk defragmenter and a TCP/IP stack.
How can Microsoft hope to maintain feature-parity with its competitors when they are free to integrate functionality and it is not ? How can *any* OS vendor who might be in a monopoly position improve their product when those improvements will almost certain be functionality that is also provided by a third party. The whole point of an OS is to run software, after all.
Trying to squirm around these restrictions by labelling such features as 'part of the operating system' is one of the reasons why some don't consider Microsoft to be behaving correctly.
Microsoft have not "bundled" anything that their competitors weren't already, or subsequently haven't. Indeed, one of the standard criticisms of Windows on Slashdot is that it doesn't come with *enough* functionality.
There are only two definition of "Operating System" relevant to this discussion. Either the academic definition, which would exclude almost every bit of functionality - including all typical methods of interaction - people expect from an "Operating System", or the marketing definition, which is basically whatever the vendor wants to say it is.
I remember the days when getting close to the functionality of a modern platform like Windows, OS X or the typical Linux distribution required spending a lot of money and time on finding and acquiring third-party software, little of which worked well together
If software can fix user error with software, why doesn't the original software "fix" the potential for error. It is obviously possible, so why not?
Because they are two separate piece of functionality, and including the "antimalware" part would probably have Microsoft embroiled in another antitrust lawsuit.
But didn't I read someplace that Microsoft were coming out with their own anti-virus/anti-whatever suite with a monthly service charge?
The purpose of "anti-malware" tools is *not* to protect against software flaws, it's to protect against user mistakes. A rather large proportion of people on Slashdot seem to have a great deal of difficult understanding this.
No amount of OS "security" can stop the end user from shooting themselves in the foot. The purpose of "anti-malware" software is to give them a chance to dodge the bullet.
Same reason every company cares about its competitors. Do not try and pretend Microsoft are (or were) doing anything unusual in this.
For instance, from a DoJ report:
I'm really not quite sure what point you think you're making here that supports your position. Marketshare is a critical part of gaining vendor support. Desktop marketshare is a cornerstone of Microsoft's entire business. Why do you think a memo stating these things is in any way unusual ?
That was from here. And another one:
Again, I'm not sure what point you think you're making here. You could replace "Windows API" with just about any other API and the comments woud be equally applicable.
It is a long, long way from "beating competitors" to "destroying technical progress". You claim the latter is the motivation behind Microsoft's software development strategy. This is an extraordinary claim (and one easily refuted by actual events, but we'll ignore that) and thus requires extraordinary proof.
That's kind of the point - originally these were other markets! That's how other browsers and media players were previously successful, because they weren't bundled with the OS. Since Microsoft bundled these with Windows, they've used their market dominance to force these to become the standard application.
Every application (and even lots of low-level system functionality) that is included with every current OS fits this description. Why is it no-one gets upset about modern OSes "bundling" shells, network stacks, widget libraries, GUIs, printer drivers, CPU schedulers, text editors, calculators, FTP clients, card games, etc, etc, etc ?
Well, being above a certain percentage of the market helps.
What percentage ? Is it variable ? What affects its value ?
How can I find out what this percentage is *before* my company reaches it ?
Of course it is. The EU is indicating how this can be avoided - by not bundling certain products and by allowing fair competition in the server market.
In other words, by not improving their product in line with competitor's products.
So it appears you can have a monopoly and not abuse it. Of course, by doing that you'll be well on the way to going out of business by the time you *don't* have a monopoly, since you won't have been able to keep your products at feature-parity with your competitors.
Not at all true. The 'abuse' comes from using the monopoly to expand into other markets, eg Microsoft with IE, Media Player, etc.
In other words, a company with a "monopoly" cannot improve its product(s) with new features that might already exist in other products.
So I was wrong. You *can* hold a monopoly position and not abuse it. You just have to let your products stagnate and avoiding any attempts to improve them in line with your competitors.
It's perfectly legitimate to have a monopoly and simply enjoy it and let it grow. It's when you use that dominant market position to force other competitiors into submission that you are breaking the law.
If the other competitors have a better product, they won't be "forced into submission". There are few examples of Microsoft products becoming dominant when they weren't the better product.
Then IE came out and cut the funding for competing browsers to a big fat zero. That is when things started to stagnate.
Your timeline is *way* off. IE 1 was released in late 1995. By late 1996 IE 3 was a sound competitor to Navigator 3. In early 1997 the IE4 betas started to appear and were considered by pretty much everyone to be noticably superior to Navigator 4.x (to take from your examples, IE4 had the first (and better) implementations of DHTML and CSS). Then Netscape finally released the bloated, slow, buggy, unstable Navigator 4.0 and IE started to destroy it in the market. By the time Netscape managed to make Navigator 4.x usable, IE4 had managed to increase its marketshare from something like 20% to about 50% - 60%. Importantly, this was *before* Windows 98 was released. IE5 and IE6 continued to incrementally improved while Netscape dithered with Navigator - but by then, the browser wars were over.
To claim that IE somehow re-energised the market is a gross misunderstanding...
While I cannot agree with GP that the browser market was stagnant when IE was first released, it is difficult to argue that the competition IE offered didn't spur Netscape on. Similarly, it is difficult to see how the situation would have been any different had Netscape, instead of IE, won the browser wars. Just look at what happened between Navigator 3.x and Navigator 4.x - Netscape thought they had such a dominant, unassailable market position that they were prepared to waste time rewriting their entire browser from scratch - and that was *with* massive competitive pressure from IE. Imagine what would have happened if that pressure wasn't there.
[...] and even if IE was better back then (and by v6 I'd say it was better) [...]
IE was the better browser at version 4. According to pretty much everyone.
[...] this doesn't change the fact that it wasn't built to be competitive. It was built to destroy the competition and then halt the progress of the web. That's just bad, no two ways about it.
I fail to see how anyone could reach this conclusion. Maybe if "the web" were the same now as it was in 1997 - 1998 (when Netscape started circling the drain), you'd have the glimmerings of a point. But it's not.
I really, really, don't understand why anyone puts Netscape up on a pedestal. Certainly, they were among the first to understand the massive potential of the web, but they - similar to Microsoft - planned to make it proprietry (oooh, "evil" (tm)) and their products after about 1996 took a significant nosedive in quality because of their arrogance in thinking that they "owned" the web and that everyone else would wait for them to set the standard.
It's that it was created for the sole purpose of destroying technical progress on the web [...]
Bullshit. It was created to beat Netscape.
Now, your *personal opinion* might be that "beating Netscape" == "destroying technical progress on the web", but objectively that equation doesn't even pass the laugh test, considering the rapid pace of "technical progress" IE's competition to Navigator sparked in the mid to late '90s (including the now ubiquitous "browser as an OS component" architecture that every major platform has since moved to, which has almost certainly played a large part in the large-scale uptake of "web enabled" services).
Netscape lost because they dropped the ball *badly* with Navigator 4.x, and by the time they'd picked it up again the game was pretty much over. If Navigator 4.0 hadn't sucked so much, and the fixes to it not taken years to appear (during an era when 6 months was a very long time), Netscape would probably be in a much more powerful position today.
And if not how can they claim to be ethical and only interested in customers?
While IE has definitely stagnated in the last couple of years, before that it was a product that clearly delivered significant benefits to customers. It is telling that, from a technical perspective, its basic design has since been reimplemented by every major platform (fortunately mostly without the mistakes Microsoft made).
There are certainly things Microsoft has done that could be construed as "evil", if you are the kind of person that thinks a corporation can be "evil". Internet Explorer is definitely not one of them - it delivered clear benefits to both end users and developers and was a perfect example of a superior product displacing an inferior one.
I have news for you. Microsoft has been evil before Google was founded.
It would be nice to live in such an insulated world that anything Microsoft has ever done could reasonably be called "evil".
They have essentially two giant products, Windows and Office and they leverage their marketshare with those two products to squash innovation throughout the industry.
OSX is a stunning achievement in OS design and development.
Eh ? Stunning compared to its predeccesor (by which I mean MacOS, not NeXT) maybe, but there's nothing especially earth shatteringly brilliant about OS X.
What's a clear, objective, unambiguous metric by which a corporation can judge whether or not it is a monopoly ? Some value that's possible to know about *before* exceeding it.
There is nothing at all wrong with a monopoly fairly gained and maintained through open competition.
For all practical purposes, it is impossible to hold a monopoly position and not "abuse" it.
A kernel intended to run on a single CPU machine can be made to run faster, partly due to less need to use locks. OpenBSD has offers two kernels for the archs that supports multi CPU: one single CPU kernel, and a multi CPU kernel. The single CPU kernel is faster.
OpenBSD's SMP support is not particularly good, I don't think it's a good example to use for performance comparison purposes.
And why does the type of home user who shuns opening his or her case need mind-blowing performance?
I don't shun opening my case, however, with 18 drives in it already it's physically incapable of holding any more - and I still have three 100Mhz, 64-bit PCI-X slots free.
More importantly, I'd prefer to pay $hundreds for some small, quiet, multi-drive eSATA enclosure than $thousands for a huge, noisy server chassis capable of holding more drives requiring the inconvenience and risk of relocating the internals of an entire machine.
The OS is so good at single-processor scheduling that allowing the CPUs to take care of who does what will effect better performance than splitting up the tasks among the processors at the OS level.
The problem with this reasoning is that all contemporary OSes have been designed with multiprocessor machines in mind and are thus not only heavily multithreaded, but also have schedulers designed to detect and take maximum advantage of, multiple CPUs.
I'm highly sceptical that any CPU can do a better job than the OS of scheduling when it has (relatively speaking) only an extremely limited view of what the machine's state is (not to mention the user's intentions), so I can't see this doing more help than harm, but I'm always willing to wait and see.
I tried a number of Linux installs on a new athlon/Asus A8v box I built. I installed FC4 and a few others but the slickest install was Ubuntu 5.10.
For the life of me I cannot understand why people rave about Ubuntu's installation procedure. The vast majority of it is no different to any other distro's text-based install and the disk partitioning section is, IMHO, relatively very difficult, unintuitive and confusing.
ABS is not threshold braking, the ABS kicks in when you start to slip.
I think you'll find modern ABS systems also measure the decelleration of the wheel and attempt to modulate the braking force *before* it actually locks up.
ABS interferes with the ability of your car to make an emergency stop. Certainly on a dry and smooth surface, but also on ice, you can do much better than the ABS by locking your wheels at the right point, if only the ABS allowed it.
An exceptionally skilled and well-practiced driver might occasionally outbrake modern ABS systems by a small amount in a particular set of circumstances.
However, they won't do it consistently, they won't do it by large amounts and as soon as you throw any sort of non-ideal elements into the scenario (wheels on difference surfaces, maneuvering) the ABS will win every time.
Basically, unless you're a professional driver who is practising emergency stopping pretty much daily and/or you're trying to stop in one of the rare situations where locking the wheels is actually beneficial, your chance of outbraking a modern ABS system is effectively zero. No amount of wishful thinking - particularly from grizzled old drivers - will change this.
(Even most professionals can't outbrake ABS systems, which is why they - along with traction control - tend to be illegal in motorsports like F1).
[...] but what's next, a car that limits people from driving over the speed limit?
This would be pretty trivial to do right now, including retrofitting to any remotely modern vehicle, but most governments depend *way* too much on the revenue that speeding fines provide to implement such a thing.
Expect to see speed-limiting implemented such that it only limits the car to just below the speed where your license would be automatically suspended and/or require a mandatory court appearance.
Thus, the reliable revenue stream is preserved and both the people who (quite rightfully) say that it's important to be able to exceed the speed limit at times are happy and the "think of the children" crowd are appeased.
The only losers, as always, are the driving enthusiasts.
No. That's just your regularly-scheduled paranoia attack.
There's a reason why many of us throw up our hands and give our primary Windows account superuser and Admin privs... and it's because there are too many niches and corners which Run As doesn't cover completely.
So list a few. If there's that many, coming up with, say, a dozen or so should be a piece of cake. Do try to leave out scenarios that are obviously deliberately manufactured and multiple examples of the same problem with different descriptions.
Go ahead, tell me you've never run into any of them and you'll demonstrate one of two things: either you're a Windows weenie who's spent time/money in MS training and knows how to set everything up perfectly or you're a newb who never needs Admin privs anyway.
I've been running NT from a regular user account since the beginning of 1996 and since then I've bumped into a few things that don't work 100% with Run As. Particularly back in the 1996 - 1999 timeframe. However, I certainly can't remember any time _recently_ I've seen something that doesn't work as expected with Run As.
And I've never had a day of Microsoft training in my life.
If Windows were a command-line centric OS then, yes, we'd all have Admin command prompts open but... hey dumbass... Windows is a GUI OS.
Your ad-hominem (unsurprisingly) hasn't explained what stops you keeping an Administrator level cmd prompt or Explorer window open.
This is not entirely the developers' faults but they are certainly a major contributing factor.
It is complete the fault of developers. There has not been any justifiable excuse for writing software that doesn't play nice with non-admin accounts since at least 1997.
Most windows software cannot be installed unless you are logged in as an admin. A great deal of windows software will not run once installed except when you are logged in as an administrator.
Both of which are 100% the fault of the person (or people) writing the software (or perhaps the installer). There is no *systemic* reason why installers cannot install software to a user's own disk space, nor why any typical application could require elevated privileges to run.
It's a vicious circle... software forces you to be logged in as admin, and therefore lazy/incompetent developers just code sloppy because they (correctly) assume all their users will be logged in as an admin, and this only encourages them to do so.
There is no blame to be placed anywhere else except in the hands of developers. There is *no need whatsoever* for them to write software that requires administrator privileges. Indeed, developers must specifically do stupid things or make worst-practice assumptions to create a situation where a non-admin account breaks software (eg: trying to open system files read/write, trying to store data in system directories or system Registry areas, etc).
There is nothing in the system or APIs that "encourages" the incorrect use of system areas.
All MS would have to do is to place a few simple, sensible requirements on software in order to be given license to use that "made for windows xp" etc logo on their box. Requiring the installer to be logged in as admin is understandable, but once installed, most software should be perfectly usable when logged in as a non-administrator. If this were a requirement to obtain license for that logo, it would do a world of good for windows security.
It *is* a requirement for the "Made for Windows XP" logo. If you find software bearing the logo that doesn't place nice with a non-Admin account, you should file it as a bug with the developer (and tell Microsoft as well so they can lean on the developer).
This is why I say that windows' security model is flawed. It may have the teoretical capability of working, but the accepted method of implementation, as sanctioned by MS, is fatally flawed. And that is microsoft's own doing.
It is *not* an "accepted method of implementation, as sanctioned by MS", it's ignorant and/or stupid and/or lazy developers writing bad software directly against the best practices Microsoft have been recommending (not to mention simple common sense) for getting close to a decade now.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with the Windows security *model*. Your complaints are 100% about the *software* written by third parties whom Microsoft has no real control over.
Microsoft Internet Explorer is only free if you own Microsoft Windows. Without a Microsoft Windows license, you have no license to run Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Unless of course you dig up one of those old copies for Solaris, HPUX or MacOS [X].
Microsoft leveraged Microsoft Windows to dominate the browser market, and then extended the browser in non-standard ways so that users must keep Microsoft Windows in order to keep their familiar browsing experience.
And it's this that makes the fall of Netscape all the more entertaining. Microsoft took Netscape's business plan (leverage the free - or nearly free - browser with proprietry extensions to sell other products) and beat them with it.
Windows has an excellent security model. The problem is people circumvent it, largely because incompetent software developers make doing so almost a necessity.
Slashdot Mirror
However, there are no independent, objective metrics. A company cannot know whether or not it is a monopoly until a court tells it.
Of course not! Bundling is not a matter of improving their product in anyway - it is a marketing strategy; a matter of getting the foot in the door first by being pre-installed.
How many popular, mainstream software products can you think of that *haven't* improved themselves via the "bundling" of features found in other software ?
How many other OSes can you name that *don't* come with "media players, etc" ? If a competitor improves its product via the integration (or "bundling", if you prefer) of certain functionaly (eg: a media player) then how can a company in a "monopoly" position similarly improve their product without being ruled abusive ?
Answer: they cannot.
To be on an equal footing in line with competitors products the extra features the media player etc. could be supplied extra on additional CDs with competitor's versions, or obtained through downloading (just like a competitors).
And if none of the competitor's products provided sufficient/equivalent functionality ? How can a company in a monopoly position provide *better* (or even equivalent) functionality than their competitors ? They cannot, because by doing so they will be considered "abusive".
Or, as I said, a company in a "monopoly" can no longer compete, nor deliver new features - in line with competitor's products - to its customers, because it will be considered "abusive".
Don't be silly. Of course you can keep your products at feature-parity.
No, you cannot. Because every feature that a competitor has which a third party may also be capable of providing - if implemented by you - is an "abuse" of a "monopoly".
The point is not to pre-install features which competitors are attempting to provide. This means things like media players, virus checkers, etc.
So why did (and does) the same logic not apply to CPU schedulers, network stacks, memory management, hardware drivers, widget sets, text editors, calculators, disk repair tools, compression tools, backup utilities, shells, GUIs, etc, etc.
All these features have, at some time in the past, been provided by "competitors" to DOS and Windows (many still are). All have since been "bundled" into Windows. No-one seems to get too hung up on the fact Windows "bundles" notepad, a disk defragmenter and a TCP/IP stack.
How can Microsoft hope to maintain feature-parity with its competitors when they are free to integrate functionality and it is not ? How can *any* OS vendor who might be in a monopoly position improve their product when those improvements will almost certain be functionality that is also provided by a third party. The whole point of an OS is to run software, after all.
Trying to squirm around these restrictions by labelling such features as 'part of the operating system' is one of the reasons why some don't consider Microsoft to be behaving correctly.
Microsoft have not "bundled" anything that their competitors weren't already, or subsequently haven't. Indeed, one of the standard criticisms of Windows on Slashdot is that it doesn't come with *enough* functionality.
There are only two definition of "Operating System" relevant to this discussion. Either the academic definition, which would exclude almost every bit of functionality - including all typical methods of interaction - people expect from an "Operating System", or the marketing definition, which is basically whatever the vendor wants to say it is.
I remember the days when getting close to the functionality of a modern platform like Windows, OS X or the typical Linux distribution required spending a lot of money and time on finding and acquiring third-party software, little of which worked well together
Because they are two separate piece of functionality, and including the "antimalware" part would probably have Microsoft embroiled in another antitrust lawsuit.
The purpose of "anti-malware" tools is *not* to protect against software flaws, it's to protect against user mistakes. A rather large proportion of people on Slashdot seem to have a great deal of difficult understanding this.
No amount of OS "security" can stop the end user from shooting themselves in the foot. The purpose of "anti-malware" software is to give them a chance to dodge the bullet.
KDE, GNOME and OS X have all moved to the same componentised browser architecture of Windows and IE.
Same reason every company cares about its competitors. Do not try and pretend Microsoft are (or were) doing anything unusual in this.
For instance, from a DoJ report:
I'm really not quite sure what point you think you're making here that supports your position. Marketshare is a critical part of gaining vendor support. Desktop marketshare is a cornerstone of Microsoft's entire business. Why do you think a memo stating these things is in any way unusual ?
That was from here. And another one:
Again, I'm not sure what point you think you're making here. You could replace "Windows API" with just about any other API and the comments woud be equally applicable.
It is a long, long way from "beating competitors" to "destroying technical progress". You claim the latter is the motivation behind Microsoft's software development strategy. This is an extraordinary claim (and one easily refuted by actual events, but we'll ignore that) and thus requires extraordinary proof.
Every application (and even lots of low-level system functionality) that is included with every current OS fits this description. Why is it no-one gets upset about modern OSes "bundling" shells, network stacks, widget libraries, GUIs, printer drivers, CPU schedulers, text editors, calculators, FTP clients, card games, etc, etc, etc ?
What percentage ? Is it variable ? What affects its value ?
How can I find out what this percentage is *before* my company reaches it ?
Of course it is. The EU is indicating how this can be avoided - by not bundling certain products and by allowing fair competition in the server market.
In other words, by not improving their product in line with competitor's products.
So it appears you can have a monopoly and not abuse it. Of course, by doing that you'll be well on the way to going out of business by the time you *don't* have a monopoly, since you won't have been able to keep your products at feature-parity with your competitors.
In other words, a company with a "monopoly" cannot improve its product(s) with new features that might already exist in other products.
So I was wrong. You *can* hold a monopoly position and not abuse it. You just have to let your products stagnate and avoiding any attempts to improve them in line with your competitors.
It's perfectly legitimate to have a monopoly and simply enjoy it and let it grow. It's when you use that dominant market position to force other competitiors into submission that you are breaking the law.
If the other competitors have a better product, they won't be "forced into submission". There are few examples of Microsoft products becoming dominant when they weren't the better product.
Your timeline is *way* off. IE 1 was released in late 1995. By late 1996 IE 3 was a sound competitor to Navigator 3. In early 1997 the IE4 betas started to appear and were considered by pretty much everyone to be noticably superior to Navigator 4.x (to take from your examples, IE4 had the first (and better) implementations of DHTML and CSS). Then Netscape finally released the bloated, slow, buggy, unstable Navigator 4.0 and IE started to destroy it in the market. By the time Netscape managed to make Navigator 4.x usable, IE4 had managed to increase its marketshare from something like 20% to about 50% - 60%. Importantly, this was *before* Windows 98 was released. IE5 and IE6 continued to incrementally improved while Netscape dithered with Navigator - but by then, the browser wars were over.
To claim that IE somehow re-energised the market is a gross misunderstanding ...
While I cannot agree with GP that the browser market was stagnant when IE was first released, it is difficult to argue that the competition IE offered didn't spur Netscape on. Similarly, it is difficult to see how the situation would have been any different had Netscape, instead of IE, won the browser wars. Just look at what happened between Navigator 3.x and Navigator 4.x - Netscape thought they had such a dominant, unassailable market position that they were prepared to waste time rewriting their entire browser from scratch - and that was *with* massive competitive pressure from IE. Imagine what would have happened if that pressure wasn't there.
[...] and even if IE was better back then (and by v6 I'd say it was better) [...]
IE was the better browser at version 4. According to pretty much everyone.
[...] this doesn't change the fact that it wasn't built to be competitive. It was built to destroy the competition and then halt the progress of the web. That's just bad, no two ways about it.
I fail to see how anyone could reach this conclusion. Maybe if "the web" were the same now as it was in 1997 - 1998 (when Netscape started circling the drain), you'd have the glimmerings of a point. But it's not.
I really, really, don't understand why anyone puts Netscape up on a pedestal. Certainly, they were among the first to understand the massive potential of the web, but they - similar to Microsoft - planned to make it proprietry (oooh, "evil" (tm)) and their products after about 1996 took a significant nosedive in quality because of their arrogance in thinking that they "owned" the web and that everyone else would wait for them to set the standard.
Bullshit. It was created to beat Netscape.
Now, your *personal opinion* might be that "beating Netscape" == "destroying technical progress on the web", but objectively that equation doesn't even pass the laugh test, considering the rapid pace of "technical progress" IE's competition to Navigator sparked in the mid to late '90s (including the now ubiquitous "browser as an OS component" architecture that every major platform has since moved to, which has almost certainly played a large part in the large-scale uptake of "web enabled" services).
Netscape lost because they dropped the ball *badly* with Navigator 4.x, and by the time they'd picked it up again the game was pretty much over. If Navigator 4.0 hadn't sucked so much, and the fixes to it not taken years to appear (during an era when 6 months was a very long time), Netscape would probably be in a much more powerful position today.
And if not how can they claim to be ethical and only interested in customers?
While IE has definitely stagnated in the last couple of years, before that it was a product that clearly delivered significant benefits to customers. It is telling that, from a technical perspective, its basic design has since been reimplemented by every major platform (fortunately mostly without the mistakes Microsoft made).
There are certainly things Microsoft has done that could be construed as "evil", if you are the kind of person that thinks a corporation can be "evil". Internet Explorer is definitely not one of them - it delivered clear benefits to both end users and developers and was a perfect example of a superior product displacing an inferior one.
How is it crippled ?
It would be nice to live in such an insulated world that anything Microsoft has ever done could reasonably be called "evil".
They have essentially two giant products, Windows and Office and they leverage their marketshare with those two products to squash innovation throughout the industry.
For example...?
Eh ? Stunning compared to its predeccesor (by which I mean MacOS, not NeXT) maybe, but there's nothing especially earth shatteringly brilliant about OS X.
What's a clear, objective, unambiguous metric by which a corporation can judge whether or not it is a monopoly ? Some value that's possible to know about *before* exceeding it.
There is nothing at all wrong with a monopoly fairly gained and maintained through open competition.
For all practical purposes, it is impossible to hold a monopoly position and not "abuse" it.
OpenBSD's SMP support is not particularly good, I don't think it's a good example to use for performance comparison purposes.
I don't shun opening my case, however, with 18 drives in it already it's physically incapable of holding any more - and I still have three 100Mhz, 64-bit PCI-X slots free.
More importantly, I'd prefer to pay $hundreds for some small, quiet, multi-drive eSATA enclosure than $thousands for a huge, noisy server chassis capable of holding more drives requiring the inconvenience and risk of relocating the internals of an entire machine.
The problem with this reasoning is that all contemporary OSes have been designed with multiprocessor machines in mind and are thus not only heavily multithreaded, but also have schedulers designed to detect and take maximum advantage of, multiple CPUs.
I'm highly sceptical that any CPU can do a better job than the OS of scheduling when it has (relatively speaking) only an extremely limited view of what the machine's state is (not to mention the user's intentions), so I can't see this doing more help than harm, but I'm always willing to wait and see.
For the life of me I cannot understand why people rave about Ubuntu's installation procedure. The vast majority of it is no different to any other distro's text-based install and the disk partitioning section is, IMHO, relatively very difficult, unintuitive and confusing.
I think you'll find modern ABS systems also measure the decelleration of the wheel and attempt to modulate the braking force *before* it actually locks up.
An exceptionally skilled and well-practiced driver might occasionally outbrake modern ABS systems by a small amount in a particular set of circumstances.
However, they won't do it consistently, they won't do it by large amounts and as soon as you throw any sort of non-ideal elements into the scenario (wheels on difference surfaces, maneuvering) the ABS will win every time.
Basically, unless you're a professional driver who is practising emergency stopping pretty much daily and/or you're trying to stop in one of the rare situations where locking the wheels is actually beneficial, your chance of outbraking a modern ABS system is effectively zero. No amount of wishful thinking - particularly from grizzled old drivers - will change this.
(Even most professionals can't outbrake ABS systems, which is why they - along with traction control - tend to be illegal in motorsports like F1).
This would be pretty trivial to do right now, including retrofitting to any remotely modern vehicle, but most governments depend *way* too much on the revenue that speeding fines provide to implement such a thing.
Expect to see speed-limiting implemented such that it only limits the car to just below the speed where your license would be automatically suspended and/or require a mandatory court appearance.
Thus, the reliable revenue stream is preserved and both the people who (quite rightfully) say that it's important to be able to exceed the speed limit at times are happy and the "think of the children" crowd are appeased.
The only losers, as always, are the driving enthusiasts.
No. That's just your regularly-scheduled paranoia attack.
There's a reason why many of us throw up our hands and give our primary Windows account superuser and Admin privs... and it's because there are too many niches and corners which Run As doesn't cover completely.
So list a few. If there's that many, coming up with, say, a dozen or so should be a piece of cake. Do try to leave out scenarios that are obviously deliberately manufactured and multiple examples of the same problem with different descriptions.
Go ahead, tell me you've never run into any of them and you'll demonstrate one of two things: either you're a Windows weenie who's spent time/money in MS training and knows how to set everything up perfectly or you're a newb who never needs Admin privs anyway.
I've been running NT from a regular user account since the beginning of 1996 and since then I've bumped into a few things that don't work 100% with Run As. Particularly back in the 1996 - 1999 timeframe. However, I certainly can't remember any time _recently_ I've seen something that doesn't work as expected with Run As.
And I've never had a day of Microsoft training in my life.
If Windows were a command-line centric OS then, yes, we'd all have Admin command prompts open but... hey dumbass... Windows is a GUI OS.
Your ad-hominem (unsurprisingly) hasn't explained what stops you keeping an Administrator level cmd prompt or Explorer window open.
It is complete the fault of developers. There has not been any justifiable excuse for writing software that doesn't play nice with non-admin accounts since at least 1997.
Most windows software cannot be installed unless you are logged in as an admin. A great deal of windows software will not run once installed except when you are logged in as an administrator.
Both of which are 100% the fault of the person (or people) writing the software (or perhaps the installer). There is no *systemic* reason why installers cannot install software to a user's own disk space, nor why any typical application could require elevated privileges to run.
It's a vicious circle... software forces you to be logged in as admin, and therefore lazy/incompetent developers just code sloppy because they (correctly) assume all their users will be logged in as an admin, and this only encourages them to do so.
There is no blame to be placed anywhere else except in the hands of developers. There is *no need whatsoever* for them to write software that requires administrator privileges. Indeed, developers must specifically do stupid things or make worst-practice assumptions to create a situation where a non-admin account breaks software (eg: trying to open system files read/write, trying to store data in system directories or system Registry areas, etc).
There is nothing in the system or APIs that "encourages" the incorrect use of system areas.
All MS would have to do is to place a few simple, sensible requirements on software in order to be given license to use that "made for windows xp" etc logo on their box. Requiring the installer to be logged in as admin is understandable, but once installed, most software should be perfectly usable when logged in as a non-administrator. If this were a requirement to obtain license for that logo, it would do a world of good for windows security.
It *is* a requirement for the "Made for Windows XP" logo. If you find software bearing the logo that doesn't place nice with a non-Admin account, you should file it as a bug with the developer (and tell Microsoft as well so they can lean on the developer).
This is why I say that windows' security model is flawed. It may have the teoretical capability of working, but the accepted method of implementation, as sanctioned by MS, is fatally flawed. And that is microsoft's own doing.
It is *not* an "accepted method of implementation, as sanctioned by MS", it's ignorant and/or stupid and/or lazy developers writing bad software directly against the best practices Microsoft have been recommending (not to mention simple common sense) for getting close to a decade now.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with the Windows security *model*. Your complaints are 100% about the *software* written by third parties whom Microsoft has no real control over.
Unless of course you dig up one of those old copies for Solaris, HPUX or MacOS [X].
Microsoft leveraged Microsoft Windows to dominate the browser market, and then extended the browser in non-standard ways so that users must keep Microsoft Windows in order to keep their familiar browsing experience.
And it's this that makes the fall of Netscape all the more entertaining. Microsoft took Netscape's business plan (leverage the free - or nearly free - browser with proprietry extensions to sell other products) and beat them with it.
Windows has an excellent security model. The problem is people circumvent it, largely because incompetent software developers make doing so almost a necessity.