... how they packaged their product.
Where do you get that idea?
It is about breaking the law.
When a company will lie, cheat, threat and harass, it not about packaging.
And that is so in the USA or anyplace in the civilized world.
when you have a corporate advantage, you use it. The fact that that company (Microsoft) had a monopoly in the market is irrelevant. In the case of the previous IE Vs Netscape war, it was fully possible for netscape to get a much wider user base then they did before Microsoft made it free, and subsequently had it install with windows 98. If Netscape had been more proactive and had a bit of foresight as to what their main competitor, being also the vendor of a operating system, might do, they could have easily slashed the price of netscape (possibly made it free for a usable edition, with a paid upgrade of sorts) they could have easily captured a lot of customers who later would install and use netscape rather then the preinstalled IE.
I'm not arguing with the fact that it might seem unfair, but why is Microsoft always the brunt of this? Is Safari not force-installed with iTunes? Is apple not then taking advantage of it's practical monopoly in the MP3 player market by doing this?
At what point does the size of a company determine exactly what it is allowed to do or not do in an attempt to oust it's competition? Should the monetary resources behind each company and used with these "war-like" advanced be regulated? No.
people continuously complain about "microsoft this" and microsoft that, all the while they buy and use Microsoft products. The very people that complain about these things are a part of what created this problem.
When Microsoft was a smaller company, and had a deal with IBM to allow IBM to distribute MS-DOS with each new PC, was that not a monopoly on the PC market? The only difference is the market was smaller and competition has sprung up in the meantime. Competition that entered the market
knowing full well Microsoft's dominant position. Whining about facts that were essentially common knowledge when the company entered into the same sectors as Microsoft is ridiculous. They decided to enter the same sector. They thought they could compete. But they can't. so they cry "MONOPOLY!"...
Which brings up another interesting analogy.
Microsoft basically has the Blues, Greens, Yellows, Reds, and Orange sets of properties, as well as the railroads. the rest of the board is owned by other companies. Would this break the rules of the game? To own so many properties? No.
because the
player came upon these properties fair and square through purchasing and trading...
lastly:
... how they packaged their product.
Where do you get that idea?
It is about breaking the law.
When a company will lie, cheat, threat and harass, it not about packaging.
And that is so in the USA or anyplace in the civilized world.
when did Microsoft lie?
when did they cheat?
when did they make any threats?
when did they harass?
The fact of the matter is, we, microsoft's customers, want more functionality from the OS. we've wanted that since windows 3.1. in answer to
our wants Microsoft decided to have internet explorer included with the OS. But apparently, some great good says this is a No No because poor struggling Browser vendor netscape was barely keeping itself afloat with it's quickly falling apart Browser.
This same BS arguement can be used by Corel since Microsoft included wordpad, Adobe because microsoft included Paint, and who knows how many other programs. The fact that the included program is of less function then the other vendors doesn't matter does it, it's the fact that it's included.
People are trying to get two things at once. Less microsoft and more from windows. without third party licensing as they did with hyperterminal, Microsoft won't be able to deliver on any of these promises because of all this BS crybaby crap that all the other companies are throwing at them. people asked for integrated Virus protection. Microsoft included Windows Defender as a basic malware prevention. And yet this is microsoft "taking advantage of it's monopoly?" No. It's microsoft giving in to consumer demand to try to improve it's image. these Crybaby companies sure as heck aren't making
that any easier by whining and complaining about any new program that Microsoft includes.
one day a system tweaker company will cry foul on Control panel. Then what?
"Microsoft Windows 7 - No control panel edition"
sounds farfetch'd? It isn't. At the time MS added the IE browser the internet was quickly coming to the fore. they decided to include the browser. After all- you cannot download netscape without a browser already installed, so it would be extremely stupid not to leave out this
basic browser (and guess what, it sure was basic- compared to IE today it's like notepad to word, which further fleshes out my previous analogies to notepad as well).