What are they doing so wrong tho ? Apart from making massive amounts of money, selling the best stuff going. Lets face it we all love windows , else we wouldn't be here in this forum.
Does anyone here run a business ? ...... The first rule of business is to make money and they do it oh so well. These fines are like a parking ticket to them.
They became a monopoly. Like I said above, they did it (Gates did it) by having an uncanny perception of where the fledgling computer market was going early on. I believe Gates envisioned every office worker having access to their own desktop computer. You must realize that early on, this was not the general view. A time-shared mainframe was the office computer and a few people had access to terminals. Secretaries typed reports on typewriters and engineers performed hand calcs or got terminal time on the mainframe. That was the norm.
Gates saw huge opportunity in cheaper (relatively, still expensive in actual dollars) computers with a standard interface. So did Jobs, ironically. In the early days, having a mix of PC and Mac was not uncommon. PC's were used for running calculations and large spreadsheets, and the macs were used by the secretaries for typing reports, etc. Where I worked, we added Unix workstations for simulation work.
When Windows 3.0 was introduced, PC's began hitting a price point where most of an office could get individual PCs. Windows became the defacto standard and soon, Windows was on 95%+ computers. At that point MS became a monopoly. Nothing wrong with that. That was the result of being smart, but then MS began using that monopoly position to force OEMs to only pre-load Windows. They did this by giving these builders HUGE discounts for a Windows license, but that discount was based on 99% of the systems sold having Windows as the OS.
There are some that claim MS added "undocumented" API calls Word, which gave it a huge display advantage in the Office arena. This lead to the fairly quick death of Word Perfect. Others claimed that by bundling IE with Windows, this forced the death of Netscape. (Those folks also forget how bad Netscape was, and how good IE was at that time.)
There are many more examples of abuse, just google MS monopoly, and I'm sure you'll find much more. Read what you find with a grain of salt, the Slashdot crowd tends to blow things out of proportion, but many of the abuse claims are real.
By abusing their position, MS put themselves in the sights of the US Gov as well as the EU commision.
This same thing happened with telephones in the US, Oil in the US, and in those cases, the Monopoly company was forced to split into separate companies. These companies were restricted in how they could interact with one another, and later became competitors. There was talk of forcing MS to split, OS, Business software (Office, etc), and Server. This never went anywhere, mut that would have been interesting. The computing landscape would certainly be different.
PhreePhly
, but for the bullk of computer users it is a problem or they are not even aware of other browsers.
) The EU comes out with pure rubbish 24/7 and i wish i wasn't part of it.
