re: M$'s attempts to dominate the Web via incompatibility torques off old M$ users and others
Friday, July 17, 2009 at 11:24 am
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by gewg_
(3936 messages posted)
Arminius wrote:
|I have never understood why Microsoft should care what browser people use.
|Since Internet Explorer is included with Windows anyway...
|
You need to remove your blinders/blinkers (aka Step away from the Kool-Aid cup).
Your argument pre-supposes that *everyone* buys Windoze.
See "tying" (below). See also "a la carte".
|...how does it benefit Microsoft for people to use IE
|as opposed to some other browser?
|It isn't as though IE has to bought and paid for, what is the payoff for them?
|
Internet Exploder, however, isn't a stand-alone product.
You need an ecosystem that supports IE (e.g. M$ stopped supporting IE on Mac).
This means that in order to use IE, you must purchase Windoze[1]
and in order to use *the latest* IE, you must purchase *the latest* Windoze.
As M$ continued to "raise the bar" by "extending what IE can do"
(doing things that broke the Worldwide Web Consortium's Web standards)[2],
then, in order to "get those extras" (purposely-broken backwards-compatibility),
some folks felt compelled to continue to "update" to the latest version of Windoze
...and they certainly made sure any new hardware they bought included Windoze
(as though M$'s illegal practices as a monopoly gave folks in most places a choice).
Requiring someone to buy one product in order to get another product
is called "tying" and it is illegal in most countries.
The You-must-buy-Windows-to-get-our-PC thing is the most blatent example.
The European Union / European Commission is currently holding the line on M$.[3]
The USA (under Republican administrations)
has a history of rolling over and playing dead on this matter.
It will be enlightening to see what tack Obama takes WRT M$.
|And did you know MS still provides updates for IE5.01sp4 under Win2000?
|
I started hearing about this thing called Linux about 1996.
By 1999, you'd even see the occasional story in the rags whose bread & butter
was selling ads to M$. At that point, I figured by the time I needed a new OS,
Linux would be mature enough to be useful
and I resolved to never again send any money to Redmond.
The Linux distros have lived up to my expectations WRT schedule and features.
For folks who haven't yet tried Linux,
there's a low-resources Linux desktop that has caught my eye recently:
from the Usenet Archive -- LXDE (The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment)
2 distros built around that and released in this calendar year
would work nicely on most folks' old Win98 boxes:
(Ubuntu-based moonOS LXDE Edition)
cache
of http://news.softpedia.com/news/Available-Now-moonOS-LXDE-Edition-2-0-105511.shtml
(Fedora 11 LXDE Remix)
cache
of http://news.softpedia.com/news/Available-Now-Fedora-11-LXDE-Remix-114272.shtml
For those folks whose hardware is a bit $tronger, there are even more choices e.g.
from the Usenet Archive -- Reviews of Linux Mint 7
I am quite smitten with Mint; it comes with all the proprietary stuff
that the USA's stupid "intellectual property" laws make difficult for non-payware.
The Mint folks already have multiple spins of their flavor of Linux
built around the KDE, Xfce, and Fluxbox desktops
and *their* lightweight-but-friendly spin built around LXDE is being assembled.
I can hardly wait till that is available so I can start recommending it.
With the hundreds of flavors of Linux available
(at least one for everyone's needs/taste/hardware)
added to the fact that most flavors of Linux are zero-cost[4]
as well as the fact that you can try most of them without installing them,
it should be obvious that M$ isn't the only game in town.
Miguel's Linux-compatible implementations of the M$ technologies
show that those misguided/dumb/evil attempts by M$ to impose boundaries
are also quite arbitrary and not really rigid/effective.
(For this and other reasons, the tech press is quite angry with M$ recently.)
[1] You no longer need Micros~1 to run Internet Exploder.
The WINE project has made it a prority to make sure that IE works under WINE
(which, in turn, runs under Linux/BSD/OpenSolaris/...).
cache
of http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Internet/HTTP-WWW-/IEs-for-Linux-11281.shtml
This is done so that Web developers who use Linux can check their work
and see how it looks in M$'s broken browser(s).
[2] Ironically, M$ is a member of W3C and is involved in drafting those standards
--which they then turn around and crap on.
[3] What I would like to see with hardware purchases
is an a la carte menu of software choices available.
I have a strong feeling when the true cost of Windoze is listed separately,
many folks will make the $0 Linux choice.
[4] The fact is that the **payware** versions of Linux aren't worth having;
they have HORRIBLE security by default.
Those payware distros were constructed to be easy for Windoze users
--and in the process, what is best about Linux was thrown out
(it's high resistance to infection).
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 | |  | | | |  | re: M$'s attempts to dominate the Web via incompatibility torques off old M$ users and others (gewg_: Fri, Jul 17, 2009, 11:24 am) |
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