There is no doubt on OOXML. It's bad by pretty much every metric one can come up with. While the Software Freedom Law Center contribution is very valuable, the summary reduces this value and snubs ISO at the same time: the decision and process is not up to MS here, it is up to ISO. ISO is not in the business of creating standards. It has the purpose of evaluating finished specifications, which OOXML is clearly not.
There's not a single implementation of OOXML in the wild. There are variations and partial implementations, but since the specification itself is neither complete nor finished, it's not ready for ISO.
All MS is doing here is wasting time and money. When MS gets serious about interoperability, it will adopt the OpenDocument Format.
That was my first thought, too, when I read that they were 'unaware' of any problems. Usually with other technology products that means only that no problems have hit the 1st page of the NYT.
... I do not think any other group has taken legal action against Slashdot in it's ten years of operation. Yeah and the tobacco executives do not think smoking is harmful or addictive. Microsofters have gone a few rounds against Slashdot now and again. Though it claims to be a business and is full of more tax dodges and creative bookkeeping than Enron, MS operates like a cult. See the analysis and summary to save time or just search for the string 'jihad'.
Dude. Mesh is not for synchronous communication. Centralized, synchronous services like WWW just aren't going to happen on mesh.
What can happen is something a synchronous like Usenet or E-mail. You could even supplement the existing network with vehicle-mounted hot points. Postal trucks, mobile health clinics, bookmobiles, and other services make the rounds regularly. No reason why they can't spool or relay messages at each stop.
Besides, centralized services like WWW are too easy to censor. Mesh can help drive a new round of freedom of communication, if it can steer clear of proprietary codecs and formats entirely.
What would be faster is if everyone checked their $#@$@# luggage. People hauling their pull along bags down the aisle and then looking for overhead room and hoisting them up is a huge delay. Make them check them all and just bring a backpack or laptop bag on board, plus security checkpoints would go faster with less stuff to scan. That proposal works fine if your bag contains nothing more valuable or breakable than dirty gym clothes.
Grub? Nope, have to do your own partitioning, then manually configure grub, after reading up on it to figure out how it works.
Partitioning? Yes. Bootcamp wins there. Though if you've set up partitions before, it's no big deal.
Configuring. Nope, or not always. Installed Kubuntu + OS X dual boot on a macbook pro and grub works like a charm there and installed and configured automatically. Can't say the same though for Debian Etch and Debian Lenny. I'm really itching to get back to Debian on the notebook, but because of grub, I have to deal with Kubuntu a while longer.
The irony is that the hardware reviews last year showed that the macbook pro was the fastest MS Vista notebook. The advantage there, is that at the worst, they have a spare operating system to play with and try out. At best, they move on from the 1980's and try the modern systems starting with OS X.
Are they going to reimburse me for buying extra RAM for my daughter's new Toshiba laptop that had 512 MB of RAM with Vista, officially offered for sale at a store that way, but with 64 MB of it reserved for video RAM, leaving the system with a whopping 448 MB of RAM? And it takes about 10 minutes to start up because the HDD is running virtually nonstop, thrashing as it pages in the minimal amount of stuff needed? And opening a web page or a simple program takes almost as long, for the same reason?...
Nearly all OEMs still allow you to upgrade to XP, but you have to ask. They won't tell you about it, you have to be active about it. But then, those that make active decisions about hardware and systems rarely end up with Windows, let alone MS Vista. Lots of people are getting burned by leaving too much of the decision up to the sales staff.
But even if you can't upgrade to XP, unless she's playing heavily some games that don't run in WINE or surfing a lot of WMV porn, then she'll get more mileage out of a linux distro like CentOS and Kubuntu. Try it. If they suck, then you can crow about it. If they save you time and effort, then it was time well spent and you can go around to any MS Vista users and rub their noses in it. Nowadays even Photoshop runs in WINE.
If it's for school only, then the 13" macbook is perfect for the backpack and can run your choice of Linux or OS X or both, plus a number of legacy applications from Windows.
Why? What's to celebrate about a bunch of vouchers or "30%-off your next MS purchase" coupons?
The most important thing would be to break the monopoly. Once the monopoly is gone, not only are the monopoly rents gone, but a double-handful of illegal and anticompetitive practices become difficult or impossible.
It could be quite an interactive project, albeit not in the way intended.
Perhaps it is a typo or the authors meant to avoid confusing the PHBs with 'technical' jargon like SSH, SFTP, and HTTPS. Page 28 of the document clearly says that FTP and Telnet are used. FTP will be used for data transfer to and from the satellite and that telnet is involve in the command and control.
Looks like Lunar Lander needs to add an option for NEO Asteroid, so that the first one to get in doesn't use all the fuel on the first try...
I know the idea of multicast has been around for a long time. Does anyone actually implement it? As far as I can tell, every stream I've ever watched has been unicast (although, I'm not sure how I'd know if it was multicast or not?).
I mean, I like the idea - only send the data through a backbone link once and let the router propagate copies to multiple local recipients - at least, I think that's the idea, right? Seems way more efficient than P2P which, while it will probably improve over-all speeds (and by extension, quality of service), probably also increases bandwidth use a lot too (because now, instead of my just receiving the stream, I'm also re-transmitting it to however many peers).
Multicast is one of the strengths of IPv6. However, nearly every last article about IPv6, including the one here recently, throws out the red herring of address space. Fsck address space. It's the least interesting, least useful and least relevant aspect of IPv6. All operating systems nowadays, except one product line, support IPv6. Drop that one product line and you can go IPv6. A good number of today's networking security problems go away at the same time, even not counting dropping that one product line.
It would make sense for BitTorrent, or a fork, to start to make use of multicast at least at the router level. Many home networks are using legacy operating systems, found on the store shelves even today, that lack proper IPv6 capabilities. Others have old LANs or routers, but connect at some point to modern IPv6 networks. No reason (that I see) the two, P2P and multicast, could not be combined.
If microsoft DID buy yahoo for more than it was worth, could the microsoft shareholders sue microsoft for wasting money? Well, MS customers have a class-action suit going over MS Vista. It would be expected that the shareholders could find fault with the way things were done as well -- just about every aspect. Getting MS to turn over incriminating records would be quite a trick though.
There's plenty of Exchange alternatives out there. You got a good chunk of the open source ones, but there's plenty of commercial competitors out there too. Domino, Byarni Insight, Novell Groupwise to name a few of them.
Yep. With Zimbra, Kolab, and Citadel that makes six. However, the magazines and newspapers don't dare write a word about them, even if they would. In addition to being one of the last remaining advertisers, MS has fifth-columnists working against competition in many places. It's not a conspiracy, just greed and/or politics.
The main reasons people use Exchange is because it is tied into Active Directory exclusively which is tied into their Windows Desktops exclusively. It also tied exclusively into Outlook (which most businesses have due to the Office monopoly), the functionality in Exchange mirrors that for Outlook; they are a perfect lock-in by design. It always comes back to illegally leveragingthe Windows/Office monopoly and vendor lock in.
If Windows or any of the products worked with standards, then it would be possible to swap out components. One reason for the extreme suckitude is that the lock-in guarantees no competition. Old habits die hard and going way back, MS DOS 4 sucked rocks a market for DR-DOS which in turn caused MS-DOS 5 which unlike 4 was usable. Same for the Windows-Outlook-Exchange, except now there is lock-in to such an extent that businesses have to be quite serious about dropping MS and getting into functional products.
If microsoft DID buy yahoo for more than it was worth, could the microsoft shareholders sue microsoft for wasting money?
Probably they could, but the question is if they would. MS appears to be about the advancement of a group and an ideology as much if not more than running an actual business. Based on its demonstrated ideals and values, one could call that MS movement an anti-American political agenda. If it were about profit or technology then MS shareholders could sue over any number of failed initiatives like MS Bob or WinME or Win98. Or about failing to deliver security, performance or even touted features. WinFS has been used in advertising since W95.
Probably the biggest gripe that MS shareholders could have would be constantly treating design flaws and security problems as public relations problems. MS doesn't even do much of its own marketing and lobbying, that's outsourced to the experts. However, these experts do a good job at spinning the design and production failures back onto the customer.
...
On the other hand, Windows XP became usable without hassles 3
years after its introduction, with the release of Service Pack 2...
Your point about MS Vista is valid, but the perceptions about XP might be based on two quirks. One is that problems fade over time. After about 2½ - 3 years it seems that most people forget the bad things and remember only a rosy picture. I'll get back to that. The other quirk is that people quickly get used to a lower level of performance and adjust their expectations and behavior accordingly. Spam and lost e-mail are the best example, but XP is a lot less flexible in many ways than 2000 was.
Getting back to rosy memories. SP2 was released far behind schedule and long after the initial hype. XP SP2 broke hundreds of applications, many had followed MS dogma about DCOM and other non-standard, mS-annointed methods of developing applications. As far as the whole operating system goes, XP SP2 brought down around 15% of XP machines to the point where the systems had to be rebuilt from scratch. Many reviewers likened the service pack to a trial of pain more like a full operating systems upgrade than a service pack.
Don't even start about the DRM, licensing and interoperability problems that SP2 added.
What's really tragic, is that despite the egregious problems of XP and, later, XP SP2, it seems like a rose garden compared to MS Vista. The good part about Google's emphasis on WINE rather than native Linux, Solaris, or BSD applications would be that it facilitates those who can hold out a bit longer in XP to be able to upgrade to a modern system, hopping off MS Windows completely, and avoiding the twin Tar Babies of MS Office 2007 and MS Vista.
As an individual shareholder I'd be primarily worried about that scenario, and I wonder why a fund forgets about it.
Conflict of interest is the first possible reason which comes to mind.
Scratch the surface, and it might be found that those making or at least influencing the decision turn out to have very strong ties to MS.
It's common for MSFTers to try to dismissing criticism by calling the critics conspiracy theorists and other names. That's a form of flawed logic, called an ad hominem fallacy. Name calling works in the forum of public opinion, but it does not change the underlying facts. In this case, there is a strong possibility of a conflict of interest, regardless of the names the messengers get called.
It's more than a case of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Gatesists made clear that they would not take "no" for an answer and would continue their plans against Yahoo one way or another. These so-called pension funds are likely part of that approach and just softening up Yahoo, while setting the media against the board in prep for its ousting. One point which is unlikely to ever make many mainstream news sites or forums, even open source ones like Slashdot, is that Microsoftologians are likely to try to replace Yahoo's board. Poisoning the press against the board is a first step.
Later, preventing the Yahoo employees from jumping off with golden parachutes might be a repeat of what MS did to Borland, except against key open source projects. Yahoo contributes in a big way to many open source projects, PHP and BSD being two Very Important (tm) ones. Getting Yahoo would crush a competitor to the spectacularly failed MSN. So without the 'chutes many would have to stay and MS could simply have them sweeping floors or making coffee.
There is also the question of Zimbra, which was recently purchased by Yahoo. MS Exchange is about the only thing that ties Windows into either/both the desktop and the server room. Zimbra is one of the few competitors to MS Exchange, besides Kolab and Citadel, none of which get much press. Quite a few shops would stop or drastically decrease use of MS products without MS Exchange. Zimbra is currently not GPL. Buying Yahoo would allow Zimbra to be put on ice as MS did with FoxPro
Advertising, aka tracking users, is another problem. MS execs want into advertising. Controlling the adservers allows a chance, finally, at income. It also allows access to be tweaked. Ads get served up first before content and delay, especially at the beginning, drastically reduces viewing time and thus mindshare. The first moments are crucial and studies show that the cap is set at 20s. A delay, on purpose or by accident, of even a fifth of a second x one million page views is hundreds of lost viewing hours. So the potential for severe abuse is there in addition to the technical problems MS services and servers are known for.
At the bottom is also a question of money. Many articles somehow neglect that much of the initial offer was funny-money, aka MSFT stock, which MS prints on demand. The noise and smoke about the attempted take over does well at drawing attention away from what must be some rather 'creative' book keeping there in Redmond.
There are plenty more possible reasons to go after Yahoo's board. Having sockpuppets poison the press makes sense for many of them.
No economic system is perfect and others failed miserably much quicker than capitalism...
Actually, to nitpick, capitalism failed spectacularly a while back, at least once, being one of the first methods to fail during the 1900's. Yet it gets propped up again and again. The last centuries have shown us that no single model works. However, there is strong evidence to show that the best pieces of several models can be combined and used together as a sort of Middle Path.
Microsoft is a good example of a company that takes profit from the "loopholes" of capitalism.
Be that as it may, no system can do well with the kind of abuse the MSFT movement is dishing out. The economic damage caused by MS has spread far beyond the IT sector and into nearly every branch of business and government.
By using lock in to their proprietary formats and bundling IE and WMP in the OS, they've achieved to keep for a long time more than 90% of market share on a wide range of products, to force people to upgrade and pay them more money, and all that without innovating (if you really look at their products, you'll see that in the last 5 years they didn't introduce any new feature worth buying, mostly cosmetic changes only). All that just using dirty tactics by making sure no one could create programs compatible or interoperatable with theirs.
I do believe in a free market, but this market we have with Microsoft is anything but free. And I do think governments have the responsability to level the playing field here.
Governments do have the legal responsibility to level the playing field. It's been tried in 1996-1998-2008, 1999-2004-2007, to point out two of the ongoing legal threads, but so far the governments have been all bark and no bite.
The end result from national and local government intervention to-date: nothing but delay.
We have twenty years of governments not being able to force the MS movement to do anything, so it's unlikely to happen now. The situation is unlikely to improve until software users, especially larger customers, vote with their wallets. Until then they are just feeding money into making the problem persist and even grown. Not that a lot of MS 'revenue' doesn't come from buying / selling / issuing its own stock, but adding to it through using the products and services doesn't send a message of disapproval.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also amazing how many of those are commercial products. It's also amazing how many commercial products are knock-offs of the FOSS tools.
In other words FOSS has been part of the market for longer than you been tying your shoes yourself.
There is no doubt on OOXML. It's bad by pretty much every metric one can come up with. While the Software Freedom Law Center contribution is very valuable, the summary reduces this value and snubs ISO at the same time: the decision and process is not up to MS here, it is up to ISO. ISO is not in the business of creating standards. It has the purpose of evaluating finished specifications, which OOXML is clearly not.
There's not a single implementation of OOXML in the wild. There are variations and partial implementations, but since the specification itself is neither complete nor finished, it's not ready for ISO.
All MS is doing here is wasting time and money. When MS gets serious about interoperability, it will adopt the OpenDocument Format.
That was my first thought, too, when I read that they were 'unaware' of any problems. Usually with other technology products that means only that no problems have hit the 1st page of the NYT.
... I do not think any other group has taken legal action against Slashdot in it's ten years of operation. Yeah and the tobacco executives do not think smoking is harmful or addictive. Microsofters have gone a few rounds against Slashdot now and again. Though it claims to be a business and is full of more tax dodges and creative bookkeeping than Enron, MS operates like a cult. See the analysis and summary to save time or just search for the string 'jihad'.same reason you can't bring your own breverages to the ballpark
Dude. Mesh is not for synchronous communication. Centralized, synchronous services like WWW just aren't going to happen on mesh.
What can happen is something a synchronous like Usenet or E-mail. You could even supplement the existing network with vehicle-mounted hot points. Postal trucks, mobile health clinics, bookmobiles, and other services make the rounds regularly. No reason why they can't spool or relay messages at each stop.
Besides, centralized services like WWW are too easy to censor. Mesh can help drive a new round of freedom of communication, if it can steer clear of proprietary codecs and formats entirely.
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Partitioning? Yes. Bootcamp wins there. Though if you've set up partitions before, it's no big deal.
Configuring. Nope, or not always. Installed Kubuntu + OS X dual boot on a macbook pro and grub works like a charm there and installed and configured automatically. Can't say the same though for Debian Etch and Debian Lenny. I'm really itching to get back to Debian on the notebook, but because of grub, I have to deal with Kubuntu a while longer.
The irony is that the hardware reviews last year showed that the macbook pro was the fastest MS Vista notebook. The advantage there, is that at the worst, they have a spare operating system to play with and try out. At best, they move on from the 1980's and try the modern systems starting with OS X.
Nearly all OEMs still allow you to upgrade to XP, but you have to ask. They won't tell you about it, you have to be active about it. But then, those that make active decisions about hardware and systems rarely end up with Windows, let alone MS Vista. Lots of people are getting burned by leaving too much of the decision up to the sales staff.
But even if you can't upgrade to XP, unless she's playing heavily some games that don't run in WINE or surfing a lot of WMV porn, then she'll get more mileage out of a linux distro like CentOS and Kubuntu. Try it. If they suck, then you can crow about it. If they save you time and effort, then it was time well spent and you can go around to any MS Vista users and rub their noses in it. Nowadays even Photoshop runs in WINE.
If it's for school only, then the 13" macbook is perfect for the backpack and can run your choice of Linux or OS X or both, plus a number of legacy applications from Windows.
Tell him to just buy a mac and get over it already.
Why? What's to celebrate about a bunch of vouchers or "30%-off your next MS purchase" coupons?
The most important thing would be to break the monopoly. Once the monopoly is gone, not only are the monopoly rents gone, but a double-handful of illegal and anticompetitive practices become difficult or impossible.
It's the revisionist history MS marketeering has been feeding everyone. It's just that the BBC decided to be a platform for its dissemination.
It could be quite an interactive project, albeit not in the way intended.
Perhaps it is a typo or the authors meant to avoid confusing the PHBs with 'technical' jargon like SSH, SFTP, and HTTPS. Page 28 of the document clearly says that FTP and Telnet are used. FTP will be used for data transfer to and from the satellite and that telnet is involve in the command and control.
Looks like Lunar Lander needs to add an option for NEO Asteroid, so that the first one to get in doesn't use all the fuel on the first try...
I mean, I like the idea - only send the data through a backbone link once and let the router propagate copies to multiple local recipients - at least, I think that's the idea, right? Seems way more efficient than P2P which, while it will probably improve over-all speeds (and by extension, quality of service), probably also increases bandwidth use a lot too (because now, instead of my just receiving the stream, I'm also re-transmitting it to however many peers).
Multicast is one of the strengths of IPv6. However, nearly every last article about IPv6, including the one here recently, throws out the red herring of address space. Fsck address space. It's the least interesting, least useful and least relevant aspect of IPv6. All operating systems nowadays, except one product line, support IPv6. Drop that one product line and you can go IPv6. A good number of today's networking security problems go away at the same time, even not counting dropping that one product line.
It would make sense for BitTorrent, or a fork, to start to make use of multicast at least at the router level. Many home networks are using legacy operating systems, found on the store shelves even today, that lack proper IPv6 capabilities. Others have old LANs or routers, but connect at some point to modern IPv6 networks. No reason (that I see) the two, P2P and multicast, could not be combined.
It sounds like a scam to avoid paying, especially to sites they don't want to pay.
Yep. With Zimbra, Kolab, and Citadel that makes six. However, the magazines and newspapers don't dare write a word about them, even if they would. In addition to being one of the last remaining advertisers, MS has fifth-columnists working against competition in many places. It's not a conspiracy, just greed and/or politics.
The main reasons people use Exchange is because it is tied into Active Directory exclusively which is tied into their Windows Desktops exclusively. It also tied exclusively into Outlook (which most businesses have due to the Office monopoly), the functionality in Exchange mirrors that for Outlook; they are a perfect lock-in by design. It always comes back to illegally leveragingthe Windows/Office monopoly and vendor lock in.There fixed that for you. It's one aspect near the heart of the 10+ year anti-trust trial MS lost in 2004 and lost in appeal for in 2007.
If Windows or any of the products worked with standards, then it would be possible to swap out components. One reason for the extreme suckitude is that the lock-in guarantees no competition. Old habits die hard and going way back, MS DOS 4 sucked rocks a market for DR-DOS which in turn caused MS-DOS 5 which unlike 4 was usable. Same for the Windows-Outlook-Exchange, except now there is lock-in to such an extent that businesses have to be quite serious about dropping MS and getting into functional products.
Probably they could, but the question is if they would. MS appears to be about the advancement of a group and an ideology as much if not more than running an actual business. Based on its demonstrated ideals and values, one could call that MS movement an anti-American political agenda. If it were about profit or technology then MS shareholders could sue over any number of failed initiatives like MS Bob or WinME or Win98. Or about failing to deliver security, performance or even touted features. WinFS has been used in advertising since W95.
Probably the biggest gripe that MS shareholders could have would be constantly treating design flaws and security problems as public relations problems. MS doesn't even do much of its own marketing and lobbying, that's outsourced to the experts. However, these experts do a good job at spinning the design and production failures back onto the customer.
... On the other hand, Windows XP became usable without hassles 3 years after its introduction, with the release of Service Pack 2...Your point about MS Vista is valid, but the perceptions about XP might be based on two quirks. One is that problems fade over time. After about 2½ - 3 years it seems that most people forget the bad things and remember only a rosy picture. I'll get back to that. The other quirk is that people quickly get used to a lower level of performance and adjust their expectations and behavior accordingly. Spam and lost e-mail are the best example, but XP is a lot less flexible in many ways than 2000 was.
Getting back to rosy memories. SP2 was released far behind schedule and long after the initial hype. XP SP2 broke hundreds of applications, many had followed MS dogma about DCOM and other non-standard, mS-annointed methods of developing applications. As far as the whole operating system goes, XP SP2 brought down around 15% of XP machines to the point where the systems had to be rebuilt from scratch. Many reviewers likened the service pack to a trial of pain more like a full operating systems upgrade than a service pack.
Don't even start about the DRM, licensing and interoperability problems that SP2 added.
What's really tragic, is that despite the egregious problems of XP and, later, XP SP2, it seems like a rose garden compared to MS Vista. The good part about Google's emphasis on WINE rather than native Linux, Solaris, or BSD applications would be that it facilitates those who can hold out a bit longer in XP to be able to upgrade to a modern system, hopping off MS Windows completely, and avoiding the twin Tar Babies of MS Office 2007 and MS Vista.
Conflict of interest is the first possible reason which comes to mind.
Scratch the surface, and it might be found that those making or at least influencing the decision turn out to have very strong ties to MS.
It's common for MSFTers to try to dismissing criticism by calling the critics conspiracy theorists and other names. That's a form of flawed logic, called an ad hominem fallacy. Name calling works in the forum of public opinion, but it does not change the underlying facts. In this case, there is a strong possibility of a conflict of interest, regardless of the names the messengers get called.
It's more than a case of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Gatesists made clear that they would not take "no" for an answer and would continue their plans against Yahoo one way or another. These so-called pension funds are likely part of that approach and just softening up Yahoo, while setting the media against the board in prep for its ousting. One point which is unlikely to ever make many mainstream news sites or forums, even open source ones like Slashdot, is that Microsoftologians are likely to try to replace Yahoo's board. Poisoning the press against the board is a first step.
Later, preventing the Yahoo employees from jumping off with golden parachutes might be a repeat of what MS did to Borland, except against key open source projects. Yahoo contributes in a big way to many open source projects, PHP and BSD being two Very Important (tm) ones. Getting Yahoo would crush a competitor to the spectacularly failed MSN. So without the 'chutes many would have to stay and MS could simply have them sweeping floors or making coffee.
There is also the question of Zimbra, which was recently purchased by Yahoo. MS Exchange is about the only thing that ties Windows into either/both the desktop and the server room. Zimbra is one of the few competitors to MS Exchange, besides Kolab and Citadel, none of which get much press. Quite a few shops would stop or drastically decrease use of MS products without MS Exchange. Zimbra is currently not GPL. Buying Yahoo would allow Zimbra to be put on ice as MS did with FoxPro
Advertising, aka tracking users, is another problem. MS execs want into advertising. Controlling the adservers allows a chance, finally, at income. It also allows access to be tweaked. Ads get served up first before content and delay, especially at the beginning, drastically reduces viewing time and thus mindshare. The first moments are crucial and studies show that the cap is set at 20s. A delay, on purpose or by accident, of even a fifth of a second x one million page views is hundreds of lost viewing hours. So the potential for severe abuse is there in addition to the technical problems MS services and servers are known for.
At the bottom is also a question of money. Many articles somehow neglect that much of the initial offer was funny-money, aka MSFT stock, which MS prints on demand. The noise and smoke about the attempted take over does well at drawing attention away from what must be some rather 'creative' book keeping there in Redmond.
There are plenty more possible reasons to go after Yahoo's board. Having sockpuppets poison the press makes sense for many of them.
Actually, to nitpick, capitalism failed spectacularly a while back, at least once, being one of the first methods to fail during the 1900's. Yet it gets propped up again and again. The last centuries have shown us that no single model works. However, there is strong evidence to show that the best pieces of several models can be combined and used together as a sort of Middle Path.
Microsoft is a good example of a company that takes profit from the "loopholes" of capitalism.
Be that as it may, no system can do well with the kind of abuse the MSFT movement is dishing out. The economic damage caused by MS has spread far beyond the IT sector and into nearly every branch of business and government.
By using lock in to their proprietary formats and bundling IE and WMP in the OS, they've achieved to keep for a long time more than 90% of market share on a wide range of products, to force people to upgrade and pay them more money, and all that without innovating (if you really look at their products, you'll see that in the last 5 years they didn't introduce any new feature worth buying, mostly cosmetic changes only). All that just using dirty tactics by making sure no one could create programs compatible or interoperatable with theirs.
I do believe in a free market, but this market we have with Microsoft is anything but free. And I do think governments have the responsability to level the playing field here.
Governments do have the legal responsibility to level the playing field. It's been tried in 1996-1998-2008, 1999-2004-2007, to point out two of the ongoing legal threads, but so far the governments have been all bark and no bite.
The end result from national and local government intervention to-date: nothing but delay.
We have twenty years of governments not being able to force the MS movement to do anything, so it's unlikely to happen now. The situation is unlikely to improve until software users, especially larger customers, vote with their wallets. Until then they are just feeding money into making the problem persist and even grown. Not that a lot of MS 'revenue' doesn't come from buying / selling / issuing its own stock, but adding to it through using the products and services doesn't send a message of disapproval.