The article doesn't really explain whether this was deliberate cheating. Did any of these folks see a doctor who straight up told them "Yes, you have this dangerous flu virus, please avoid airline travel because we need to contain it?" Otherwise, it's not unusual for people to feel the onset of a cold or flu and take "medicine" (i.e. symptom blockers) so they can feel better and avoid missing work. Is it strange that people might do this to avoid missing a flight (and aren't airplane tickets often non-refundable?) with no intention of cheating anything? I mean, if you stopped random people in the street and asked them, I doubt most of them would even know that airliners have body-temperature scanners.
When Win98 was the most popular desktop OS, Linux users everywhere realized the general public thought that computer crashes and frequent reboots were a normal, inherent part of operating a computer. They were not, and Linux proved that, but there is/was widespread ignorance about these things and the general public continued to buy Windows
When windows 98 was the most popular Desktop OS, it was also the best desktop OS that would run on commodity hardware. Remember, The era of Win 98 was 1998 to 2000, at which point the state of the art Linux Distro was Red Hat 6, which had little or no support for a staggering amount of hardware. Want to use a win modem, or a webcam, or a USB printer? Best stick with win 98 then. Sure, Red Hat never crashed, but what use was that if my 56k modem didn't work?
Obviously things are better now, but don't go looking back with rose tinted glasses. The first Linux distro I ever used was Slackware 3.something, back in the mid-nineties, so I was perfectly aware that there were better alternatives out there, but I didn't switch to a Linux desktop completely till Red Hat 9, because there was always some show stopper of a problem with my hardware.
I became interested in Linux in 1997 and have been using it ever since. I know what you mean, and I dealt with it by picking hardware for my OS of choice rather than the more haphazard approach of hoping that my OS of choice will run on random hardware which I did not choose. For me, that was the simple solution. It was particularly easy because I strongly prefer to build systems from parts so I had to make decisions about the hardware anyway; Linux support was just another criteria.
I remember those days too, things like using a calculator to figure out my XFree86 (at the time it was not yet Xorg) modelines. The problem you mention wasn't such a showstopper because especially ten years ago, people who knew their way around a Linux system were a rather self-selecting group. They were the folks who really enjoyed computing and didn't consider it a chore to be more involved in their own experience. Therefore, they tended to be very comfortable with things like deliberate selection of hardware and building their own systems etc. To use a tired old car analogy, few people would be surprised if a professional mechanic who really loves his work has made more modifications to his car than the average person and had no difficulty selecting the correct parts with which to make them.
Embrace Extend Extinguish comes to mind for starters. I'd say their ability to control the markets they are in is also more effective than their marketing. I'm sure there's more if i cared to keep going.
Does "marketing" have a strict definition that could not be construed to include those things? I don't know the answer to that. I honestly thought that controlling or at least influencing the market was the primary goal of all marketing efforts and that the main difference between MS and other companies is that MS is more willing to engage in "questionable" marketing practices. I'm being careful how I say that because there are many things they do which may or may not be illegal (don't ask me, ask a lawyer) but in my mind are clearly unethical. I always saw embrace-extend-extinguish and their various forms of vendorlock as essential components of their marketing strategy, which is actually one of the primary reasons why I dislike them.
There's a reason we've seen so many anti-trust lawsuits against them, and it isn't because they are great at marketing. I'd even venture that if what they were "best" at was marketing, they wouldn't be the target of so much hatred and scandalous news we hear of every other day at slashdot.
I think it's a great triumph of their marketing efforts that they remain so profitable despite the widespread disdain towards them. You may hate their guts but if you continue to buy their products they are not going to feel very hated. As the goal of a corporation is to produce a profit, and they are indeed profitable, it would be quite difficult for me to make the case that their marketing is inherently flawed. They have cash reserves which are the envy of many other companies. You could in fact say that their marketing is so effective that only the government was able to do anything to place some limits on it.
As others have said, I cannot prove but suspect that this is sort of like the "automobile recall" situation described in the movie Fight Club. If they know that the profit they will make from engaging in illegal activities is greater than the fines they will have to pay when they are caught, they don't really have a business reason not to engage in them. In that case, while I have no problem saying that they are a bunch of despicable bastards who would probably sell their first-born for a nickel, I must admit that in purely business terms, their strategy is sound.
I'll try to say this in a way that doesn't cause a flamewar. If you disagree with this, I accept that, but understand that at least the perception of this is quite real. Another reason why they are considered a marketing company more than a software company is that, with a few exceptions, it is not difficult to find higher-quality software than what they produce. That's a fact of which the general public is unaware, which is probably also marketing. When Win98 was the most popular desktop OS, Linux users everywhere realized the general public thought that computer crashes and frequent reboots were a normal, inherent part of operating a computer. They were not, and Linux proved that, but there is/was widespread ignorance about these things and the general public continued to buy Windows and learned to accept its problems because it did not occur to them to demand better until years later.
recent studies [appleinsider.com] demonstrate that only iphone users are young, hip, cool, earn more than 70k a year and in general are more educated and productive
neither Apple nor Canonical enjoy Microsoft's monopoly position
Actually, Apple does. During the DOJ trial, it was ruled that Apple was not in Microsoft's market, and was excluded from marketshare numbers. This makes Apple it's own monopoly. Even though Apple now uses x86 processors, you can't run MacOS on normal PC's (legally), so this makes them a monopoly of their own market.
And if that doesn't represent how out-of-touch many government officials are regarding technology, few things could. I don't doubt that those folks understand business and law quite well, but in this particular case that isn't the same thing at all. If you were implying that there is no meaningful difference between Microsoft's monopoly position and Apple's "monopoly" position (maybe you weren't), I'll explain why that doesn't work.
Apple differs from Microsoft because Microsoft sells only the OS; Apple sells complete systems that include their OS. However, Apple's complete systems are an alternative to a combination of a Microsoft operating system and standard PC hardware (provided by multiple vendors). To put that another way, the average OSX user does things like word processing and Web browsing, just like the average PC user. They are two different solutions with similar capabilities that are competing in the same market. The meaningful difference is that with Microsoft, you have a much wider selection of underlying hardware.
What you've really done is to illustrate the difference between an economic monopoly and a legal monopoly. Microsoft with its vast marketshare is an economic monopoly in the desktop market. Apple would be a legal monopoly in the desktop market because some folks at the DOJ think (thought?) so.
The most meaningful difference is that an economic monopoly can successfully engage in a wide variety of anticompetitive practices (legal and illegal), while a legal monopoly like Apple would find that difficult or impossible. Just try to picture Apple crushing a company that makes Web browsers by including its own browser for free, and then causing widespread adoption of non-standard HTML by creating proprietary extensions for that browser. They wouldn't be able to do that. Why? Because they have less than 10% of the desktop marketshare.
I wouldn't have a problem, except that MS is the only one forced to do this. Apple with OSX? You get safari, shut the fuck up and like it. Ubuntu? Hey, here's Firefox for ya, hope you like it. Why should MS be the only one, when it's just a matter of scale? So if Windows wasn't popular, it wouldn't be a problem to bundle IE in?
Others have pointed out that MS is being treated as a special case because it is a special case; neither Apple nor Canonical enjoy Microsoft's monopoly position. They did a good enough job of that; I just wanted to address another portion of your post.
I really don't know much about OSX so I'll limit my comment to Linux. I use a Gentoo Linux system and these are some of the Web browsers available to me: Chromium (Open Source version of Google's Chrome), Epiphany, Galeon, Firefox, Seamonkey, Opera and Konqueror. Epiphany, Galeon, Seamonkey, and Firefox all use the Mozilla rendering engine while the others do not. This is Gentoo so by default there is no GUI browser installed; you have to pick one (or more). All of them are installed, updated, and uninstalled through the same package manager.
Ubuntu has different goals than does Gentoo, but everything I said about Gentoo browser selection applies to Ubuntu. The only difference is that Ubuntu comes with a browser already installed by default. However, that browser can be uninstalled and replaced (as well as have any updates taken care of) with a single interface, which is Ubuntu's own package manager.
To compare that Linux situation with Microsoft, Windows, and IE is intellectually dishonest to be frank with you. For that to be a valid comparison, Microsoft would need a centalized package manager through which most or all of your programs and utilities can be installed and removed, with no regard for who makes those programs. Then, IE would be just another option the user can easily choose; maybe it is the default but is still listed side-by-side with the other options. Then there would be a meaningful comparison but right now there is only contrast. Of course, if it were done this way, there probably wouldn't be a browser-related anti-trust case to begin with.
I'll join you in getting heavily modded down by the MS bashers, this whole thing is insane. MS says theyll remove the browser, but thats not good enough, they have to provide the browser, because not doing so would be providing less, and somehow also, via magic, not have it be used unless the user wants to.
Give me a break.
The goal is to make IE earn its marketshare by competing with other available Windows browsers. That's really not a bad goal, not when you consider that it would probably put a lot of pressure on IE to become better and more standards-compliant. It would mean IE being installed only when a user actually chooses it, just like Firefox or Opera or Chrome. More practically, since its rendering engine is used throughout Windows, it would probably mean IE being visible to the user and set as the default browser only when this is requested by the user.
You hardly need magic to make that happen. Imagine a simple, primitive sort of package manager that has only one task: connecting to a microsoft.com server and retrieving the latest download links for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera (etc.) allowing the user to choose a default browser. This package manager would also list IE and be able to do whatever is necessary to make it visible on the system and set as the default browser. All of these browser options could be listed side-by-side in an unbiased way, such as alphabetical order. Also, the package manager would have whatever programming is necessary to download and initiate the installation of the chosen browser, so you also avoid the chicken-and-egg problem of how an average user would download a browser without first having some kind of browser. Then you set that package manager to run on the first boot-up of Windows and you also make it available in the Control Panel so it can be changed at any time.
I'll admit I am a bit surprised that so many people are dissatisfied with this news. So far I have not seen such a person provide a constructive solution to whatever they perceived as a problem worthy of complaint (that part is less surprising). It didn't take me very long to think of one; maybe yours would be better.
Give me a break. The guy who is coming up with this on the EC is probably still types M$ in his inter-office emails.
Maybe he has an odd sense of humor? Perhaps he does that thinking "somewhere, some Slashdotter is going to complain about this." I bet he eats food you don't like and listens to music you don't like too, just to piss you off.
Really though the whole "M$" thing probably would have gone away some time ago if it weren't for the contempt it sometimes inspires. There are more egregious (and at the same time, less intentional) spelling errors and deviations out there. They just aren't as noteworthy because nothing brings out that "us versus them" element quite like a large powerful organization.
I'm confused. So if I get a copy of Windows in Europe and do a full reinstall, how am I supposed to use my already-active internet connection to get Firefox?
It would be great if 100% of all decisions were based on that kind of rational analysis. Unfortunately, there's one problem: people.
People who are making choices, mostly by the failure to realize that not making a choice is also a choice. People who can choose differently and who can stop being their own worst enemies when it comes to looking out for their own interests and making good decisions. I refuse to accept the status quo as immutable, in other words. It can change, and it will change the moment people want it to. Also, not everything lends itself to rational analysis, but computers and software certainly do.
You may dislike marketing, but there's a simple reason companies spend boatloads of money on it: it works. People can be influenced.
I agree that it works and I don't dislike it because it works. I dislike it because it works for all of the wrong reasons. It tends to exploit personal weaknesses and character flaws far more than it ever tends to appeal to facts and reason.
The reasons why marketing works are often presented as natural tendencies that are the inevitable result of being human. They're not. They are carefully cultivated by public education, media, corporations, and government and are then presented as normal and natural. It isn't just that people are not taught critical thinking, argumentation, and self-evaluation; it's that they are actively encouraged not to use these tools. Thus, in order to discuss this accurately, we are talking about "influence" and not about "persuasion".
To me, the Yellow Pages are as close to "perfect advertising" as it gets: you aren't bombarded with it, it's not loud and obnoxious, you only see it when you go looking for it, and you can quickly find what you're after.
And people are being influenced, in one way or another, with respect to their views of open software.
My views of Open Source software come from one source: actually using and administering it on my own equipment. Prior to that, it came from careful investigation and comparsion between it and the Windows system I was using at the time. I'd rather see us encourage this method than try to come up with clever branding and marketing techniques, and I'd rather see that even if it means Linux will always remain a small minority of desktop installations.
I liken to greed any approach that consists of trying to get masses of people to flock to Linux or Open Source in general at any cost. That kind of thinking made Windows the mass-market product that it is with all of the problems that go along with it and the lack of involvement with their own choices that its users are well known for exhibiting ("I can't learn a few easy steps because I'm not some kind of geek or computer expert" etc). Here I am not talking about the technical merits of the OS, for that is not directly related to the marketing, but rather, the culture that goes along with it. That culture is much more responsible for the malware problems that plague Windows than any technical feature or design decision that Microsoft made.
So we should reign in the name-callers on either side, and empower those people who know how to build cooperation, corporations, and positive feedback loops.
Can we also empower those people who know the difference between the words "reign", meaning the possession of power or authority, and "rein", which is the strap that you use to control a horse?
Then maybe we could rein in some of the worst abuses of the English language.
Next thing ya know, you'll want people to stop calling themselves "editors" unless they are willing to proofread that single paragraph (a whole paragraph, what a tremendous burden huh?) before submitting it to an audience of many tens of thousands of people.
But there is a brand whether or not it's intentionally created. The output of this "random barbarian horde of software developers" all falls under a single label, "open source", and therefore has the "open source" brand. He describes a brand as being "anyone's gut feeling". In other words, what is it that people think of when they hear "open source software"? Well, that's the brand. It may not have been shaped by anyone intentionally, but it still exists. So, he wants to shape it.
He also makes the point that the de facto brand is actually shaped by those who compete with open source. Microsoft, for example, shapes the open source brand through its marketing. Therefore, by not making a concerted effort to shape the brand in a positive way, the community is effectively allowing it to be shaped in a negative way.
All of that sounds to me like a substitute for evaluating the merits of all of your available software options and making your own decision based on your needs.
There's only one problem, one fatal flaw: there is no substitute for that. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
Take that into the public sphere. It is impossible to debate an issue on its merits, because the time necessary would be prohibitive.
I'd wager that time has very little to do with it. More like, debating issues on merits would fatally wound, kill, bury, and hold funeral services for this concept that all viewpoints are inherently equal. They're not. Some of them are supported by facts and reasoning.
For example, take the gun control issue. You know what I have never, ever once heard an anti-gun/pro-gun control individual comment on? The fact that every US state which has enacted conceal-carry permits has seen significant reductions in violent crime. They refuse to address this fact because this fact contradicts their position. Rather than consider whether their position no longer fits the available facts and whether it should be discarded and replaced with a different viewpoint, they just pretend not to notice the available facts. That means, these aren't "issues" at all that we're "debating", they are more like religious beliefs. The cost of doing things this way is seldom appreciated.
There are people in the commercial realm who will claim that the differences between Open Source and Commercial are insignificant, and that the current state of the code should be the sole quality by which they are judged. And the Open Source people will foam at the mouth over it, because the differences are very significant.
Then those same people will turn around and claim that the differences between Free Software and Open Source are insignificant.
Compromises that grant others leverage over you are never insignificant.
I agree with you and wanted to add an opinion about the one part of this you did not mention. In the article/summary they talk about strenghtening Open Source as a "brand". One of the social aspects of Open Source that I dearly enjoy is that the people involved in it generally don't need for it to be a brand and they don't need slick marketing in order to see the merits of something. They tend to be freethinkers and thus are generally much more sophisticated, discerning and independent than that.
I really think the folks who want it to be another brand imagine that the purpose of Open Source is to battle Windows for domination of the desktop. I have always felt that Open Source can thrive just fine without becoming the next Windows. I also believe that the only way to really beat Windows would be to become just like it, and in the specific case of Linux, that would represent the loss or the de-emphasis of many things I really like about it.
What you said here. People were so buy foaming at the mouth that they never bothered to read the actual article or the thousands of posts that spelled out pretty clearly how and why the slashdot story got it wrong.
Never seen that before. No, not ever.
It's funny when you can cut+paste your comment and drop it into multiple discussions without having to modify it. It is truly one-size-fits-all.
"Stop. Look. Listen, learn, read, think.. SHUT THE FUCK UP!" - Bill Hicks
While I think the "we deserve a cut of used sales!" argument is bullshit, GameStop would make the publishers a lot happier if it split its used game business off into a separate entity.
Well, sure. That's a general principle of this sort of politicking: someone who does what you don't want them to do is much easier to demonize and bully than someone who does what you want them to do and also does what you don't want them to do. Thinking of it that way, in those terms and in that spirit, is not generally the first and most natural reaction of the average person. It may occur to them and they may be capable of it, but they have to put some effort into it. This isn't the case for the suits, control freaks, greedy bastards, maladaptive manipulators, fevered egos -- whatever you want to call them -- and they got where they are today by having no qualms whatsoever that would interfere with their use of such tactics or of this kind of thinking. When they successfully manipulate, it's nothing personal; it's just business.
This kind of Machiavellian politicking and the act of believing it is valid, left unchecked, is what destroyed the balance that once existed between the profit incentive of copyright and the benefit of society. It's also a great enabler of the many other issues which cause thinking persons to realize that throughout much of the world, our governments and corporations seldom represent our interests anymore. They claim to represent them fully while doing so only minimally or not at all. You see it when public commercials say "police ticket you for seatbelt violations because they care about you" but they're unwilling to donate the ticket money to charity. You see it too when smiling people on commercials tell you that the company really cares, but you know they would stop pretending to if it would raise their profits. The message from this mentality is that we're not really human beings but just a means to an end, like one step in the solution of an everyday problem. It's not intentionally evil but ends up that way because it's dehumanizing.
More specifically, GameStop sells the new titles which does give the publishers a cut of the money, and they sell the used titles that don't. If the publishers play too much hardball against GameStop for the sales of used games, they harm relations with a customer that also produces profit for them. If a separate entity performs the uses game sales exclusively, then the publishers have nothing to lose, and thus no incentive, against doing everything they can do to stop them. That's why your idea may work well in the short term but long-term, it would make that company an easy target for publishers who have already revealed that they want a piece of this market.
Myself included. When it comes to getting around regional blocks, I just want a program I can open up and forget about.
I shouldn't comment on whether or not I actually would do this, or do this, but I'll just say that hypothetically, that's the point where I would find it quite tempting to just find whatever I'm after via BitTorrent and reap the secondary benefit of no ads. I think the suits behind outfits like Hulu don't understand the concept of "they're going to get what they want one way or another, the question is, will it be your way?"
Don't think twice about it. I have too often responded harshly on/. when there was no need for it. I believe it is due to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory [penny-arcade.com].
Haha yeah. I try not to fit that pattern but I certainly have my moments. I appreciate that you seem to not take everything so seriously; it's certainly better than the alternative of getting upset. I can't attribute it unfortunately, but I am reminded of a joke a coworker told me once: (a man says this to his wife late at night) "Honey, I can't come to bed yet, because someone on the Internet is WRONG!"
Yeah, it's a VPN. Sorry that the site's layout isn't very well done, but I recommended the product, not the website. It's, as compro says below, "free (as in beer) and stupid simple to use", which is why I recommend it.
That's a definite plus because I imagine the number of people who want something like this greatly dwarfs the number of folks who are technically oriented.
If you've finished complaining about the website, maybe you can suggest one of these tools, because telling micromuncher that there are plenty of open source tools that he can use without mentioning any by name isn't very helpful.
Most open source tools I know about are intended for *nix only and are distributed (at least by upstream) as source code. Freshmeat.net is probably the best place to find those, for there are several, and sourceforge.net is probably a good place too. Regarding Windows, I'd try some of the major freeware download sites. I don't mean to dismiss what you are saying by responding with "search for it" but that really is how I would find something suitable if I were the person who needed it.
Otherwise, I should say that while I was thoroughly unimpressed with that Web site, I didn't intend to sound that harsh or to make you feel so much like my criticism was aimed at you and I'm sorry about that. Sometimes I post something and immediately feel like I could have done a much better job of it, and this is one of those times.
In America we have a right to an operating system, just as we have a right to air, thanks to the folks who developed FreeBSD, Linux, etc.
It never fails to amaze me how an inferior, paid for OS can sell any copies when there is a superior free alternative.
Because using that free alternative means learning about how it works, at least enough to know how to effectively use it, and Americans have had at least twelve years of formal education during which they were taught that learning is boring, difficult, can only be done by rote, and must be administered by people who care about you as a human being in only the most perfunctory sense. The joy of discovery or the triumph of overcoming something that was difficult for you is completely alien to them and that's a real shame. The institutionalized schools are certainly blameworthy, though there comes a point where an individual has to decide that he won't allow himself to be deprived of important things anymore.
To put that another way, you'd be amazed at how much flak I catch sometimes just for suggesting that a literate adult in America with no mental disabilities has no excuse for being unable to educate himself about computers when he has a 'Net connection, the needed information is unrestricted, freely available, and easily located via Google. I reject the entire notion that "impossible" is a synonym for "somewhat inconvenient" and some people really don't seem to like that very much. That's your real obstacle which explains why people don't do more for themselves, don't equip themselves, and don't decide that they want something better for themselves and are willing to invest some of their time in it. This dynamic isn't just limited to operating systems but can be found everywhere that people sell themselves short and put up with injustice and mediocrity for the sake of their precious convenience.
The real injustice is that those of us who don't fit this description (not because we're special, but because we recognize it as a problem and try very hard not to contribute to it) have to live in nations full of people who do. We get to live with the legal, political, and social repercussions of being in a society where the vast majority of people are not interested in good decision-making and don't want the personal responsibility of being more actively involved in their own lives. That is, of course, unsustainable, which is part of why things are so chaotic right now.
The mark of a shitty site like that one is that nowhere on it could I find anything resembling an accurate explanation of what it is and how it works. My thought on that was "and they expect me to want to download and install it?" So then I tried their "News" section and found that some of the links to "articles" just take you to a username/password that wants you to have a subscription to Advertising Age for the privilege of viewing their fine article/advertisement. Finally after perusing several links, I found out that your Hotspot Shield is just a VPN tool. If it's anything more than that, they seem to want to keep it a secret. I should have known because of how much that site looked like those annoying link farms you sometimes get if you slightly misspell the domain name of a legitimate site. Thanks but no thanks.
The above link is nothing but spam. Maybe you didn't intend it as such, and I respect that, but that's all it is to me. If it does serve a useful purpose, it's none that can't be accomplished using open source tools, or on Windows, tools that clearly state what they do and how they do it before you download and install them.
Then everybody wins, since it's the choice of the subscriber.
If you were dealing with people who believed in and celebrated choice, they wouldn't be trying so hard to make Hulu just like TV. Instead, they'd show us the availability and selection that modern information technology can offer. They'd also make an effort to prove that a legitimate site can offer compelling reasons to appreciate their content that you won't find on BitTorrent.
You might have the best and most useful addon in the world, but if you install it on other peoples' computers in an underhanded or less-than-honest way, you're going to cause problems.
You're overblowing this by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Some points to keep in mind, for this to have happened to you:
1. You already made a conscious choice to install that version of.NET.
2. That version of.NET installed the plugin in IE.
3. You made a choice to install the update, or you allow auto updates.
4. The first time you restarted firefox after this, you had to ignore the popup that tells you that this new plugin was installed. And you had to choose NOT to disable it (which works just fine, only 'uninstall' was blocked).
This was a very minor thing. Most people that installed.NET 3+ expected ClickOnce to work on all browsers. Why wouldnt it? Adding this to the other popular browser, which huge numbers of people have been asking for for years, is not that big of a deal.
It wasnt a silent install, it didnt use any nefarious techniques, it didnt bypass FF's plugin mechanism (despite the general ignorance of/.'ers on how the two types of plugins work on FF), and it is trivial to disable.
The only arguable thing here is that they should have shipped it as a standalone patch. This is arguable, but fairly minor.
And its only arguable by people who also chose to uninstall/disable Flash, JRE, and PDF plugins as well, as those are all full of holes and have a long history of security issues. The.NET sandbox, on the other hand, has a nearly flawless security history.
Treated as an isolated incident, you may have a (debatable) point. However, let's not forget that this is the same company that made WGA a "security update," so they have some history of pulling shit like this. Just like this addon, WGA did not fix any bugs or flaws in existing Microsoft software, so it is dishonest (the kind of intellectual dishonesty that some call "PR") to call either one a security update. It's quite naive to ignore the fact that they have a history of doing this, or to pretend like it somehow doesn't matter and doesn't affect how their actions should be viewed today. Even if their intent really truly was innocent (which would be nice but cannot be proven), the fact that they have abused the update system in the past to push software that is not in the customers' interests but is in their own interests means they deserve to have this regarded as a suspicious move.
Besides, if you want to publish an extension for Firefox, the correct place is addons.mozilla.org. You know why Microsoft didn't do it that way? Because it isn't a captive audience. No one would go to mozilla.org and download this extension unless they really wanted it, which doesn't get the marketshare/usage numbers that Microsoft desires. People who trust Microsoft to not issue a "security update" that doesn't actually fix a flaw in existing Microsoft software, now those are a captive audience for so long as they have auto-updates enabled.
Hopefully you now understand why this is regarded by some as an underhanded move. Now if you like Microsoft and think they're great, you won't want to regard this as underhanded. You'll believe whatever you want to believe no matter what I say or what anyone else says. So, what you believe isn't my concern. In fact, I've never seen Microsoft do anything that was unethical or questionably ethical without somebody somewhere defending them and I accepted this reality a long time ago. It's like some people want so badly to believe that they're going to play nice this time that they want to give amoral corporations a benefit of doubt that they do not deserve and have not earned. It's funny, because most of these same people would never trust a human being again who betrayed their trust only one time.
If you want a positive spin on outsourcing think of it this way.
We decided instead of using up our limited resources we would concentrate on using up china's first. Steel,copper,even oil. We are using up the world's resources shipping them here and eventually storing them in easy to access locations(landfills). So whenthe time comes that we need more resources wehave already hogged the important ones, and stored them for future generations.
So I say buy from china. All your resources belong to us!
I don't know about China specifically, but historically we used to do that by importing raw materials and producing the goods here, which meant we had a fairly strong manufacturing component to our economy. What has changed is that now we seem to favor importing finished goods, because the manufacturing is the part where we'd have to compete with people overseas who will work for near-slave wages. So, I don't quite disagree with you in principle, though I think the implementation of that principle is important too.
witter, like any communications medium, is what you make of it.
Twitter isn't a communications medium. The Web is the communications medium. Twitter just prepackages it for you, and you can have any color you want so long as that color is black (i.e. like the first cars).
You could start a blog and write about nothing other than the cute things your cat did today, you could write about topics of earth-shattering importance, or your blog could fall somewhere in the middle. You could Twitter about nothing other than the inane details of your life (cue link to the Penny Arcade strip) or you could use Twitter to connect to and keep in touch with a group of people online. E-mail, web pages, television, etc. They can all be used for the inane and valueless or for the interesting and full-of-meaning.
You can do all of that without Twitter. Again you are describing the Web. Twitter just provides a one-size-fits-all way to go about it. That, and only that, is what some people dislike about it.
The rest of your post is more of the "all things are equal and just a matter of taste, even if they're not" that someone chimes in and rewrites in one form or another anytime there is any sort of discussion where someone actually stands up and says "no, I think this sucks." It's cute and all but it's not terribly productive. It is just a way of saying "people have different preferences" and since we knew that already, it doesn't really contribute anything. What it does do is make you look like a nice person who just wants to get along, which is cool, but nice people don't have to be so atrociously bland; they can have opinions too.
Slashdot Mirror
The article doesn't really explain whether this was deliberate cheating. Did any of these folks see a doctor who straight up told them "Yes, you have this dangerous flu virus, please avoid airline travel because we need to contain it?" Otherwise, it's not unusual for people to feel the onset of a cold or flu and take "medicine" (i.e. symptom blockers) so they can feel better and avoid missing work. Is it strange that people might do this to avoid missing a flight (and aren't airplane tickets often non-refundable?) with no intention of cheating anything? I mean, if you stopped random people in the street and asked them, I doubt most of them would even know that airliners have body-temperature scanners.
When Win98 was the most popular desktop OS, Linux users everywhere realized the general public thought that computer crashes and frequent reboots were a normal, inherent part of operating a computer. They were not, and Linux proved that, but there is/was widespread ignorance about these things and the general public continued to buy Windows When windows 98 was the most popular Desktop OS, it was also the best desktop OS that would run on commodity hardware. Remember, The era of Win 98 was 1998 to 2000, at which point the state of the art Linux Distro was Red Hat 6, which had little or no support for a staggering amount of hardware. Want to use a win modem, or a webcam, or a USB printer? Best stick with win 98 then. Sure, Red Hat never crashed, but what use was that if my 56k modem didn't work? Obviously things are better now, but don't go looking back with rose tinted glasses. The first Linux distro I ever used was Slackware 3.something, back in the mid-nineties, so I was perfectly aware that there were better alternatives out there, but I didn't switch to a Linux desktop completely till Red Hat 9, because there was always some show stopper of a problem with my hardware.
I became interested in Linux in 1997 and have been using it ever since. I know what you mean, and I dealt with it by picking hardware for my OS of choice rather than the more haphazard approach of hoping that my OS of choice will run on random hardware which I did not choose. For me, that was the simple solution. It was particularly easy because I strongly prefer to build systems from parts so I had to make decisions about the hardware anyway; Linux support was just another criteria.
I remember those days too, things like using a calculator to figure out my XFree86 (at the time it was not yet Xorg) modelines. The problem you mention wasn't such a showstopper because especially ten years ago, people who knew their way around a Linux system were a rather self-selecting group. They were the folks who really enjoyed computing and didn't consider it a chore to be more involved in their own experience. Therefore, they tended to be very comfortable with things like deliberate selection of hardware and building their own systems etc. To use a tired old car analogy, few people would be surprised if a professional mechanic who really loves his work has made more modifications to his car than the average person and had no difficulty selecting the correct parts with which to make them.
Does "marketing" have a strict definition that could not be construed to include those things? I don't know the answer to that. I honestly thought that controlling or at least influencing the market was the primary goal of all marketing efforts and that the main difference between MS and other companies is that MS is more willing to engage in "questionable" marketing practices. I'm being careful how I say that because there are many things they do which may or may not be illegal (don't ask me, ask a lawyer) but in my mind are clearly unethical. I always saw embrace-extend-extinguish and their various forms of vendorlock as essential components of their marketing strategy, which is actually one of the primary reasons why I dislike them.
I think it's a great triumph of their marketing efforts that they remain so profitable despite the widespread disdain towards them. You may hate their guts but if you continue to buy their products they are not going to feel very hated. As the goal of a corporation is to produce a profit, and they are indeed profitable, it would be quite difficult for me to make the case that their marketing is inherently flawed. They have cash reserves which are the envy of many other companies. You could in fact say that their marketing is so effective that only the government was able to do anything to place some limits on it.
As others have said, I cannot prove but suspect that this is sort of like the "automobile recall" situation described in the movie Fight Club. If they know that the profit they will make from engaging in illegal activities is greater than the fines they will have to pay when they are caught, they don't really have a business reason not to engage in them. In that case, while I have no problem saying that they are a bunch of despicable bastards who would probably sell their first-born for a nickel, I must admit that in purely business terms, their strategy is sound.
I'll try to say this in a way that doesn't cause a flamewar. If you disagree with this, I accept that, but understand that at least the perception of this is quite real. Another reason why they are considered a marketing company more than a software company is that, with a few exceptions, it is not difficult to find higher-quality software than what they produce. That's a fact of which the general public is unaware, which is probably also marketing. When Win98 was the most popular desktop OS, Linux users everywhere realized the general public thought that computer crashes and frequent reboots were a normal, inherent part of operating a computer. They were not, and Linux proved that, but there is/was widespread ignorance about these things and the general public continued to buy Windows and learned to accept its problems because it did not occur to them to demand better until years later.
In other words, you own one?
Money.
neither Apple nor Canonical enjoy Microsoft's monopoly position
Actually, Apple does. During the DOJ trial, it was ruled that Apple was not in Microsoft's market, and was excluded from marketshare numbers. This makes Apple it's own monopoly. Even though Apple now uses x86 processors, you can't run MacOS on normal PC's (legally), so this makes them a monopoly of their own market.
And if that doesn't represent how out-of-touch many government officials are regarding technology, few things could. I don't doubt that those folks understand business and law quite well, but in this particular case that isn't the same thing at all. If you were implying that there is no meaningful difference between Microsoft's monopoly position and Apple's "monopoly" position (maybe you weren't), I'll explain why that doesn't work.
Apple differs from Microsoft because Microsoft sells only the OS; Apple sells complete systems that include their OS. However, Apple's complete systems are an alternative to a combination of a Microsoft operating system and standard PC hardware (provided by multiple vendors). To put that another way, the average OSX user does things like word processing and Web browsing, just like the average PC user. They are two different solutions with similar capabilities that are competing in the same market. The meaningful difference is that with Microsoft, you have a much wider selection of underlying hardware.
What you've really done is to illustrate the difference between an economic monopoly and a legal monopoly. Microsoft with its vast marketshare is an economic monopoly in the desktop market. Apple would be a legal monopoly in the desktop market because some folks at the DOJ think (thought?) so.
The most meaningful difference is that an economic monopoly can successfully engage in a wide variety of anticompetitive practices (legal and illegal), while a legal monopoly like Apple would find that difficult or impossible. Just try to picture Apple crushing a company that makes Web browsers by including its own browser for free, and then causing widespread adoption of non-standard HTML by creating proprietary extensions for that browser. They wouldn't be able to do that. Why? Because they have less than 10% of the desktop marketshare.
Others have pointed out that MS is being treated as a special case because it is a special case; neither Apple nor Canonical enjoy Microsoft's monopoly position. They did a good enough job of that; I just wanted to address another portion of your post.
I really don't know much about OSX so I'll limit my comment to Linux. I use a Gentoo Linux system and these are some of the Web browsers available to me: Chromium (Open Source version of Google's Chrome), Epiphany, Galeon, Firefox, Seamonkey, Opera and Konqueror. Epiphany, Galeon, Seamonkey, and Firefox all use the Mozilla rendering engine while the others do not. This is Gentoo so by default there is no GUI browser installed; you have to pick one (or more). All of them are installed, updated, and uninstalled through the same package manager.
Ubuntu has different goals than does Gentoo, but everything I said about Gentoo browser selection applies to Ubuntu. The only difference is that Ubuntu comes with a browser already installed by default. However, that browser can be uninstalled and replaced (as well as have any updates taken care of) with a single interface, which is Ubuntu's own package manager.
To compare that Linux situation with Microsoft, Windows, and IE is intellectually dishonest to be frank with you. For that to be a valid comparison, Microsoft would need a centalized package manager through which most or all of your programs and utilities can be installed and removed, with no regard for who makes those programs. Then, IE would be just another option the user can easily choose; maybe it is the default but is still listed side-by-side with the other options. Then there would be a meaningful comparison but right now there is only contrast. Of course, if it were done this way, there probably wouldn't be a browser-related anti-trust case to begin with.
I'll join you in getting heavily modded down by the MS bashers, this whole thing is insane. MS says theyll remove the browser, but thats not good enough, they have to provide the browser, because not doing so would be providing less, and somehow also, via magic, not have it be used unless the user wants to.
Give me a break.
The goal is to make IE earn its marketshare by competing with other available Windows browsers. That's really not a bad goal, not when you consider that it would probably put a lot of pressure on IE to become better and more standards-compliant. It would mean IE being installed only when a user actually chooses it, just like Firefox or Opera or Chrome. More practically, since its rendering engine is used throughout Windows, it would probably mean IE being visible to the user and set as the default browser only when this is requested by the user.
You hardly need magic to make that happen. Imagine a simple, primitive sort of package manager that has only one task: connecting to a microsoft.com server and retrieving the latest download links for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera (etc.) allowing the user to choose a default browser. This package manager would also list IE and be able to do whatever is necessary to make it visible on the system and set as the default browser. All of these browser options could be listed side-by-side in an unbiased way, such as alphabetical order. Also, the package manager would have whatever programming is necessary to download and initiate the installation of the chosen browser, so you also avoid the chicken-and-egg problem of how an average user would download a browser without first having some kind of browser. Then you set that package manager to run on the first boot-up of Windows and you also make it available in the Control Panel so it can be changed at any time.
I'll admit I am a bit surprised that so many people are dissatisfied with this news. So far I have not seen such a person provide a constructive solution to whatever they perceived as a problem worthy of complaint (that part is less surprising). It didn't take me very long to think of one; maybe yours would be better.
Maybe he has an odd sense of humor? Perhaps he does that thinking "somewhere, some Slashdotter is going to complain about this." I bet he eats food you don't like and listens to music you don't like too, just to piss you off.
Really though the whole "M$" thing probably would have gone away some time ago if it weren't for the contempt it sometimes inspires. There are more egregious (and at the same time, less intentional) spelling errors and deviations out there. They just aren't as noteworthy because nothing brings out that "us versus them" element quite like a large powerful organization.
I'm confused. So if I get a copy of Windows in Europe and do a full reinstall, how am I supposed to use my already-active internet connection to get Firefox?
FTP?
People who are making choices, mostly by the failure to realize that not making a choice is also a choice. People who can choose differently and who can stop being their own worst enemies when it comes to looking out for their own interests and making good decisions. I refuse to accept the status quo as immutable, in other words. It can change, and it will change the moment people want it to. Also, not everything lends itself to rational analysis, but computers and software certainly do.
I agree that it works and I don't dislike it because it works. I dislike it because it works for all of the wrong reasons. It tends to exploit personal weaknesses and character flaws far more than it ever tends to appeal to facts and reason.
The reasons why marketing works are often presented as natural tendencies that are the inevitable result of being human. They're not. They are carefully cultivated by public education, media, corporations, and government and are then presented as normal and natural. It isn't just that people are not taught critical thinking, argumentation, and self-evaluation; it's that they are actively encouraged not to use these tools. Thus, in order to discuss this accurately, we are talking about "influence" and not about "persuasion".
To me, the Yellow Pages are as close to "perfect advertising" as it gets: you aren't bombarded with it, it's not loud and obnoxious, you only see it when you go looking for it, and you can quickly find what you're after.
My views of Open Source software come from one source: actually using and administering it on my own equipment. Prior to that, it came from careful investigation and comparsion between it and the Windows system I was using at the time. I'd rather see us encourage this method than try to come up with clever branding and marketing techniques, and I'd rather see that even if it means Linux will always remain a small minority of desktop installations.
I liken to greed any approach that consists of trying to get masses of people to flock to Linux or Open Source in general at any cost. That kind of thinking made Windows the mass-market product that it is with all of the problems that go along with it and the lack of involvement with their own choices that its users are well known for exhibiting ("I can't learn a few easy steps because I'm not some kind of geek or computer expert" etc). Here I am not talking about the technical merits of the OS, for that is not directly related to the marketing, but rather, the culture that goes along with it. That culture is much more responsible for the malware problems that plague Windows than any technical feature or design decision that Microsoft made.
Can we also empower those people who know the difference between the words "reign", meaning the possession of power or authority, and "rein", which is the strap that you use to control a horse?
Then maybe we could rein in some of the worst abuses of the English language.
Next thing ya know, you'll want people to stop calling themselves "editors" unless they are willing to proofread that single paragraph (a whole paragraph, what a tremendous burden huh?) before submitting it to an audience of many tens of thousands of people.
But there is a brand whether or not it's intentionally created. The output of this "random barbarian horde of software developers" all falls under a single label, "open source", and therefore has the "open source" brand. He describes a brand as being "anyone's gut feeling". In other words, what is it that people think of when they hear "open source software"? Well, that's the brand. It may not have been shaped by anyone intentionally, but it still exists. So, he wants to shape it.
He also makes the point that the de facto brand is actually shaped by those who compete with open source. Microsoft, for example, shapes the open source brand through its marketing. Therefore, by not making a concerted effort to shape the brand in a positive way, the community is effectively allowing it to be shaped in a negative way.
All of that sounds to me like a substitute for evaluating the merits of all of your available software options and making your own decision based on your needs.
There's only one problem, one fatal flaw: there is no substitute for that. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
I'd wager that time has very little to do with it. More like, debating issues on merits would fatally wound, kill, bury, and hold funeral services for this concept that all viewpoints are inherently equal. They're not. Some of them are supported by facts and reasoning.
For example, take the gun control issue. You know what I have never, ever once heard an anti-gun/pro-gun control individual comment on? The fact that every US state which has enacted conceal-carry permits has seen significant reductions in violent crime. They refuse to address this fact because this fact contradicts their position. Rather than consider whether their position no longer fits the available facts and whether it should be discarded and replaced with a different viewpoint, they just pretend not to notice the available facts. That means, these aren't "issues" at all that we're "debating", they are more like religious beliefs. The cost of doing things this way is seldom appreciated.
So, I take it you're a proponent of proprietary software? Because I sure wouldn't want to use something called "hippyware".
Why not, man?
Indeed.
There are people in the commercial realm who will claim that the differences between Open Source and Commercial are insignificant, and that the current state of the code should be the sole quality by which they are judged. And the Open Source people will foam at the mouth over it, because the differences are very significant.
Then those same people will turn around and claim that the differences between Free Software and Open Source are insignificant.
Compromises that grant others leverage over you are never insignificant.
I agree with you and wanted to add an opinion about the one part of this you did not mention. In the article/summary they talk about strenghtening Open Source as a "brand". One of the social aspects of Open Source that I dearly enjoy is that the people involved in it generally don't need for it to be a brand and they don't need slick marketing in order to see the merits of something. They tend to be freethinkers and thus are generally much more sophisticated, discerning and independent than that.
I really think the folks who want it to be another brand imagine that the purpose of Open Source is to battle Windows for domination of the desktop. I have always felt that Open Source can thrive just fine without becoming the next Windows. I also believe that the only way to really beat Windows would be to become just like it, and in the specific case of Linux, that would represent the loss or the de-emphasis of many things I really like about it.
What you said here. People were so buy foaming at the mouth that they never bothered to read the actual article or the thousands of posts that spelled out pretty clearly how and why the slashdot story got it wrong.
Never seen that before. No, not ever.
.. SHUT THE FUCK UP!" - Bill Hicks
It's funny when you can cut+paste your comment and drop it into multiple discussions without having to modify it. It is truly one-size-fits-all.
"Stop. Look. Listen, learn, read, think
Well, sure. That's a general principle of this sort of politicking: someone who does what you don't want them to do is much easier to demonize and bully than someone who does what you want them to do and also does what you don't want them to do. Thinking of it that way, in those terms and in that spirit, is not generally the first and most natural reaction of the average person. It may occur to them and they may be capable of it, but they have to put some effort into it. This isn't the case for the suits, control freaks, greedy bastards, maladaptive manipulators, fevered egos -- whatever you want to call them -- and they got where they are today by having no qualms whatsoever that would interfere with their use of such tactics or of this kind of thinking. When they successfully manipulate, it's nothing personal; it's just business.
This kind of Machiavellian politicking and the act of believing it is valid, left unchecked, is what destroyed the balance that once existed between the profit incentive of copyright and the benefit of society. It's also a great enabler of the many other issues which cause thinking persons to realize that throughout much of the world, our governments and corporations seldom represent our interests anymore. They claim to represent them fully while doing so only minimally or not at all. You see it when public commercials say "police ticket you for seatbelt violations because they care about you" but they're unwilling to donate the ticket money to charity. You see it too when smiling people on commercials tell you that the company really cares, but you know they would stop pretending to if it would raise their profits. The message from this mentality is that we're not really human beings but just a means to an end, like one step in the solution of an everyday problem. It's not intentionally evil but ends up that way because it's dehumanizing.
More specifically, GameStop sells the new titles which does give the publishers a cut of the money, and they sell the used titles that don't. If the publishers play too much hardball against GameStop for the sales of used games, they harm relations with a customer that also produces profit for them. If a separate entity performs the uses game sales exclusively, then the publishers have nothing to lose, and thus no incentive, against doing everything they can do to stop them. That's why your idea may work well in the short term but long-term, it would make that company an easy target for publishers who have already revealed that they want a piece of this market.
I shouldn't comment on whether or not I actually would do this, or do this, but I'll just say that hypothetically, that's the point where I would find it quite tempting to just find whatever I'm after via BitTorrent and reap the secondary benefit of no ads. I think the suits behind outfits like Hulu don't understand the concept of "they're going to get what they want one way or another, the question is, will it be your way?"
Haha yeah. I try not to fit that pattern but I certainly have my moments. I appreciate that you seem to not take everything so seriously; it's certainly better than the alternative of getting upset. I can't attribute it unfortunately, but I am reminded of a joke a coworker told me once: (a man says this to his wife late at night) "Honey, I can't come to bed yet, because someone on the Internet is WRONG!"
That's a definite plus because I imagine the number of people who want something like this greatly dwarfs the number of folks who are technically oriented.
Most open source tools I know about are intended for *nix only and are distributed (at least by upstream) as source code. Freshmeat.net is probably the best place to find those, for there are several, and sourceforge.net is probably a good place too. Regarding Windows, I'd try some of the major freeware download sites. I don't mean to dismiss what you are saying by responding with "search for it" but that really is how I would find something suitable if I were the person who needed it.
Otherwise, I should say that while I was thoroughly unimpressed with that Web site, I didn't intend to sound that harsh or to make you feel so much like my criticism was aimed at you and I'm sorry about that. Sometimes I post something and immediately feel like I could have done a much better job of it, and this is one of those times.
In America we have a right to an operating system, just as we have a right to air, thanks to the folks who developed FreeBSD, Linux, etc.
It never fails to amaze me how an inferior, paid for OS can sell any copies when there is a superior free alternative.
Because using that free alternative means learning about how it works, at least enough to know how to effectively use it, and Americans have had at least twelve years of formal education during which they were taught that learning is boring, difficult, can only be done by rote, and must be administered by people who care about you as a human being in only the most perfunctory sense. The joy of discovery or the triumph of overcoming something that was difficult for you is completely alien to them and that's a real shame. The institutionalized schools are certainly blameworthy, though there comes a point where an individual has to decide that he won't allow himself to be deprived of important things anymore.
To put that another way, you'd be amazed at how much flak I catch sometimes just for suggesting that a literate adult in America with no mental disabilities has no excuse for being unable to educate himself about computers when he has a 'Net connection, the needed information is unrestricted, freely available, and easily located via Google. I reject the entire notion that "impossible" is a synonym for "somewhat inconvenient" and some people really don't seem to like that very much. That's your real obstacle which explains why people don't do more for themselves, don't equip themselves, and don't decide that they want something better for themselves and are willing to invest some of their time in it. This dynamic isn't just limited to operating systems but can be found everywhere that people sell themselves short and put up with injustice and mediocrity for the sake of their precious convenience.
The real injustice is that those of us who don't fit this description (not because we're special, but because we recognize it as a problem and try very hard not to contribute to it) have to live in nations full of people who do. We get to live with the legal, political, and social repercussions of being in a society where the vast majority of people are not interested in good decision-making and don't want the personal responsibility of being more actively involved in their own lives. That is, of course, unsustainable, which is part of why things are so chaotic right now.
Try Hotspot Shield. Works for me.
The mark of a shitty site like that one is that nowhere on it could I find anything resembling an accurate explanation of what it is and how it works. My thought on that was "and they expect me to want to download and install it?" So then I tried their "News" section and found that some of the links to "articles" just take you to a username/password that wants you to have a subscription to Advertising Age for the privilege of viewing their fine article/advertisement. Finally after perusing several links, I found out that your Hotspot Shield is just a VPN tool. If it's anything more than that, they seem to want to keep it a secret. I should have known because of how much that site looked like those annoying link farms you sometimes get if you slightly misspell the domain name of a legitimate site. Thanks but no thanks.
The above link is nothing but spam. Maybe you didn't intend it as such, and I respect that, but that's all it is to me. If it does serve a useful purpose, it's none that can't be accomplished using open source tools, or on Windows, tools that clearly state what they do and how they do it before you download and install them.
If you were dealing with people who believed in and celebrated choice, they wouldn't be trying so hard to make Hulu just like TV. Instead, they'd show us the availability and selection that modern information technology can offer. They'd also make an effort to prove that a legitimate site can offer compelling reasons to appreciate their content that you won't find on BitTorrent.
You might have the best and most useful addon in the world, but if you install it on other peoples' computers in an underhanded or less-than-honest way, you're going to cause problems.
You're overblowing this by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Some points to keep in mind, for this to have happened to you:
1. You already made a conscious choice to install that version of .NET.
2. That version of .NET installed the plugin in IE.
3. You made a choice to install the update, or you allow auto updates.
4. The first time you restarted firefox after this, you had to ignore the popup that tells you that this new plugin was installed. And you had to choose NOT to disable it (which works just fine, only 'uninstall' was blocked).
This was a very minor thing. Most people that installed .NET 3+ expected ClickOnce to work on all browsers. Why wouldnt it? Adding this to the other popular browser, which huge numbers of people have been asking for for years, is not that big of a deal.
It wasnt a silent install, it didnt use any nefarious techniques, it didnt bypass FF's plugin mechanism (despite the general ignorance of /.'ers on how the two types of plugins work on FF), and it is trivial to disable.
The only arguable thing here is that they should have shipped it as a standalone patch. This is arguable, but fairly minor.
And its only arguable by people who also chose to uninstall/disable Flash, JRE, and PDF plugins as well, as those are all full of holes and have a long history of security issues. The .NET sandbox, on the other hand, has a nearly flawless security history.
Treated as an isolated incident, you may have a (debatable) point. However, let's not forget that this is the same company that made WGA a "security update," so they have some history of pulling shit like this. Just like this addon, WGA did not fix any bugs or flaws in existing Microsoft software, so it is dishonest (the kind of intellectual dishonesty that some call "PR") to call either one a security update. It's quite naive to ignore the fact that they have a history of doing this, or to pretend like it somehow doesn't matter and doesn't affect how their actions should be viewed today. Even if their intent really truly was innocent (which would be nice but cannot be proven), the fact that they have abused the update system in the past to push software that is not in the customers' interests but is in their own interests means they deserve to have this regarded as a suspicious move.
Besides, if you want to publish an extension for Firefox, the correct place is addons.mozilla.org. You know why Microsoft didn't do it that way? Because it isn't a captive audience. No one would go to mozilla.org and download this extension unless they really wanted it, which doesn't get the marketshare/usage numbers that Microsoft desires. People who trust Microsoft to not issue a "security update" that doesn't actually fix a flaw in existing Microsoft software, now those are a captive audience for so long as they have auto-updates enabled.
Hopefully you now understand why this is regarded by some as an underhanded move. Now if you like Microsoft and think they're great, you won't want to regard this as underhanded. You'll believe whatever you want to believe no matter what I say or what anyone else says. So, what you believe isn't my concern. In fact, I've never seen Microsoft do anything that was unethical or questionably ethical without somebody somewhere defending them and I accepted this reality a long time ago. It's like some people want so badly to believe that they're going to play nice this time that they want to give amoral corporations a benefit of doubt that they do not deserve and have not earned. It's funny, because most of these same people would never trust a human being again who betrayed their trust only one time.
If you want a positive spin on outsourcing think of it this way.
We decided instead of using up our limited resources we would concentrate on using up china's first. Steel,copper,even oil. We are using up the world's resources shipping them here and eventually storing them in easy to access locations(landfills). So whenthe time comes that we need more resources wehave already hogged the important ones, and stored them for future generations.
So I say buy from china. All your resources belong to us!
I don't know about China specifically, but historically we used to do that by importing raw materials and producing the goods here, which meant we had a fairly strong manufacturing component to our economy. What has changed is that now we seem to favor importing finished goods, because the manufacturing is the part where we'd have to compete with people overseas who will work for near-slave wages. So, I don't quite disagree with you in principle, though I think the implementation of that principle is important too.
Twitter isn't a communications medium. The Web is the communications medium. Twitter just prepackages it for you, and you can have any color you want so long as that color is black (i.e. like the first cars).
You can do all of that without Twitter. Again you are describing the Web. Twitter just provides a one-size-fits-all way to go about it. That, and only that, is what some people dislike about it.
The rest of your post is more of the "all things are equal and just a matter of taste, even if they're not" that someone chimes in and rewrites in one form or another anytime there is any sort of discussion where someone actually stands up and says "no, I think this sucks." It's cute and all but it's not terribly productive. It is just a way of saying "people have different preferences" and since we knew that already, it doesn't really contribute anything. What it does do is make you look like a nice person who just wants to get along, which is cool, but nice people don't have to be so atrociously bland; they can have opinions too.