6 ms·
When was the last time the acted the 800lb gorilla? When then yanked one publisher's books from their book store? Or when they refused to approve Google Voice f
by DenisM 17y ago
When was the last time the acted the 800lb gorilla? When then yanked one publisher's books from their book store? Or when they refused to approve Google Voice for Windows?
Microsoft has been thoroughly declawed by the antitrust suite - all the energetic and ruthlessly effective people who were driving company forward have left Microsoft about 10 years ago when they realized they can't use their favorite set of tools anymore. This is why Microsoft hasn't been changing the world in the last 10 years, in a good or bad way.
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoRailroading a shoddy partial translation of their Office suite memory dump format into XML through ISO, destroying that organizations credibility as it did so. That was a dick move.
- DenisM 17y agoHm, good point. I forgot about that.
- cakesy 17y agoWhat about when they tried to bribe the Standards committee and get their XML Document format approved? That was only a year or 2 ago?
- berntb 17y agoA while ago, I couldn't buy a new netbook with Linux from Amazon -- which prides itself on earning money on "the long tail". Most of the netbook market was Linux a year or two earlier. I really doesn't doubt the articles I've read about Microsoft leaning on ASUS et al.
- DenisM 17y agoThe customer sat for Linux netbooks was horrible and return rates were sky-high. Geeks like linux, but normal people prefer convenience which often times means nothing more than familiarity.
- berntb 17y agoNote the point about long tail in what you commented on... Google for it.
- krakensden 17y agoIn defense of Linux, the vendor linuxes on those netbooks were generally a terribly broken custom user interface on top of a broken and badly hacked up distribution. They could have done much better by asking Canonical or Novell to write the last drivers they needed and using Ubuntu or SuSe.
- rbanffy 17y agoThat was one opinion. IIRC, about the same time, Dell commented customer satisfaction was about the same on both sides.
- InclinedPlane 17y agoLest we forget, one of the major consequences of the anti-trust decision against Microsoft was that it made MS afraid to innovate in the web browser area (that was where it got pounded so heavily in the courts). Since it had a 90+% market share in browsers at the time MS decided there wasn't much reason to continue developing IE and they effectively stopped development. It wasn't until Firefox started to gain popularity that MS began to pour serious effort into updating IE. In short: the anti-trust lawsuits against MS are at least partially responsible for IE6 retaining significant market share for such a long period of time.
- berntb 17y agoSo you claim that wasn't motivated by slowing the development of browsers, which in turn slowed the moving of applications to the Web? (Which was the reason that Microsoft used its monopoly to kill Netscape and got into hot water from the beginning.) Edit: Consider how "well" Microsoft followed directives from the EU. It is a bit hilarious to claim that MS stopped developing something without even court orders and threats of being fined billions...