6 ms·

Microsoft was considered to have a monopoly (whether you or I agree). As such they were subject to different rules. Apple, especially when iPhone launched, did

Microsoft was considered to have a monopoly (whether you or I agree). As such they were subject to different rules. Apple, especially when iPhone launched, did not have any kind of monopoly on cellphones nor did they have one on PDAs (which is really where smartphones come from, not cellphones). As for people, people didn't sue Microsoft, companies did. People mostly didn't care. Companies like Sun and Netscape cared. They're they ones that lobbied to have the government declare MS a monopoly. In other words nothing to do with execution and perceived awesomeness by customers. At the time MS was sued IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure so customers wanted it. It was companies that were upset. Also malware infested vs walled garden is a false dichotomy

masklinn 11y ago
Yep. The issue of MSIE wasn't so much bundling a browser, as leveraging an existing monopoly into a second one and unfairly driving out competition. > As for people, people didn't sue Microsoft, companies did. People did sue Microsoft as the US Federal Government (United States v. Microsoft Corp.) and as the European Commission (Microsoft Corp v Commission), even if those cases may have been prompted by company complaints (that was the case for Microsoft Corp v Commission, not sure for United States v. Microsoft Corp.)
chroma 11y ago
In the paragraphs I quoted, the point was basically: If Microsoft had tried what Apple actually did, it would have been a disaster for Microsoft. I think that's accurate regardless of whether they were a monopoly or not. > Also malware infested vs walled garden is a false dichotomy How so? The vast majority of users can't tell if an application is malware. Better for them to put their trust in an authority who can tell (and who can punish authors of any malware that gets through).
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  No uneducated user is safe. And I believe malware on smartphones are not unheard of. Short term, sure, give in to the walled garden. Long term though? Learning what a computer is might be a good idea.
  - carapace 11y ago
    Sad that this is getting downvotes, it's one of the most important points about this vast machine we are building around ourselves: You cannot secure [people who suffer from] ignorance. "No uneducated user is safe." Very much so. Personally, I feel that this is a disgraceful failing on the part of the global computer industry et. al., but that is beside the main issue of, "What the heck are we going to do about this!?"
    - loup-vaillant 11y ago
      My take on it is, the computer industry, because they're capitalists like any industry, care about money. The engineers working there often care about the users of course, but the shareholders don't give a damn. They just want money. Ultimately, that greed determines the output of the engineers far more effectively than the ideals of the engineers themselves. (This could be generalised to basically any public company, and any of their employees. Employment is an amazing crowd control tool.) To sell stuff, promise of usefulness is more important than genuine usefulness. We only care about the substance insofar as it reinforces the appeal (fortunately, the stuff gotta be genuinely useful, or the scam would be exposed). The industry could explain how computers work, but that would be far less effective than selling selling a magic wand. So we end up with computers that hide their internals, so the user doesn't have to deal with them. Language based interface (command line) is put aside for the point & click "caveman interface" (Bret Victor showed us some amazing GUI, but rarely ever saw this since sketchpad). And we pile up abstractions on top of abstractions without stopping for a minute to consider the sheer madness of the distributed cognitive load implied by a personal computing system that requires over 10.000 thick books to write.
      - carapace 11y ago
        Yes, all of the above. This wasn't so bad when our reach was less, but today with Siri-like things being built into Barbie dolls it seems we should be spending more time thinking deeply before we chase that dollar, eh? (P.S. I'm a fan of your Earley Parser Explained post. Kudos, great job!)
  - 11y ago
tremon 11y ago
At the time MS was sued IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure Meh. IE was the browser with the best website compatibility, because Microsoft went out of its way to reimplement half of the HTML standard in its own way, and could use the prevalence of IE to make webdevelopers follow "their" flavour of HTML. Mozilla's first Firefox release came with the slogan "take back the web". That motto had nothing to do with the excellence of IE.
- jerf 11y ago
  IE4 was head and shoulders above Netscape 4. IE4 is recognizably a modern browser (by introducing .innerHTML), if a very poor one by modern standards; Netscape 4 was hackery on an engine taken way beyond what it could sustain. Netscape require a long time to catch up, and the helping hand Microsoft gave by slowing down dev on IE round about IE6. There was a long window where IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure and I'm pretty sure it overlapped this lawsuit, though my brain and the calendar don't always get along perfectly. You can argue that IE was that good due to Microsoft being able to leverage its monopoly to develop something for free they could never have afforded to develop otherwise, since that argument basically won in a court of law give or take some nuances. But, in the meantime, IE really was a better browser for a good long time.
  - SFjulie1 11y ago
    You mean mosaic by Spyglass Inc which was rebranded IE? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29 MS has been massively rebranding external products since the beginning and owe part of its excellency to their dominant self enforcing position using smartly the invention of Bill Gates: proprietary software and smart use of Intellectual Monopoly. A little strings will also show you quite a few "Berkeley source/MIT" licensed code.
pjc50 11y ago
PDAs (which is really where smartphones come from, not cellphones). It's just as much one as the other; let's not forget Symbian? At the time MS was sued IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure so customers wanted it [citation needed]! People used it because it was preinstalled.
- majormajor 11y ago
  Symbian also came from a PDA OS. And yeah, Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4 was pretty crappy, as was the first Netscape 6/Mozilla stuff for a few years pre-Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

masklinn 11y ago

Yep. The issue of MSIE wasn't so much bundling a browser, as leveraging an existing monopoly into a second one and unfairly driving out competition. > As for people, people didn't sue Microsoft, companies did. People did sue Microsoft as the US Federal Government (United States v. Microsoft Corp.) and as the European Commission (Microsoft Corp v Commission), even if those cases may have been prompted by company complaints (that was the case for Microsoft Corp v Commission, not sure for United States v. Microsoft Corp.)

chroma 11y ago

In the paragraphs I quoted, the point was basically: If Microsoft had tried what Apple actually did, it would have been a disaster for Microsoft. I think that's accurate regardless of whether they were a monopoly or not. > Also malware infested vs walled garden is a false dichotomy How so? The vast majority of users can't tell if an application is malware. Better for them to put their trust in an authority who can tell (and who can punish authors of any malware that gets through).

loup-vaillant 11y ago
No uneducated user is safe. And I believe malware on smartphones are not unheard of. Short term, sure, give in to the walled garden. Long term though? Learning what a computer is might be a good idea.
- carapace 11y ago
  Sad that this is getting downvotes, it's one of the most important points about this vast machine we are building around ourselves: You cannot secure [people who suffer from] ignorance. "No uneducated user is safe." Very much so. Personally, I feel that this is a disgraceful failing on the part of the global computer industry et. al., but that is beside the main issue of, "What the heck are we going to do about this!?"
  - loup-vaillant 11y ago
    My take on it is, the computer industry, because they're capitalists like any industry, care about money. The engineers working there often care about the users of course, but the shareholders don't give a damn. They just want money. Ultimately, that greed determines the output of the engineers far more effectively than the ideals of the engineers themselves. (This could be generalised to basically any public company, and any of their employees. Employment is an amazing crowd control tool.) To sell stuff, promise of usefulness is more important than genuine usefulness. We only care about the substance insofar as it reinforces the appeal (fortunately, the stuff gotta be genuinely useful, or the scam would be exposed). The industry could explain how computers work, but that would be far less effective than selling selling a magic wand. So we end up with computers that hide their internals, so the user doesn't have to deal with them. Language based interface (command line) is put aside for the point & click "caveman interface" (Bret Victor showed us some amazing GUI, but rarely ever saw this since sketchpad). And we pile up abstractions on top of abstractions without stopping for a minute to consider the sheer madness of the distributed cognitive load implied by a personal computing system that requires over 10.000 thick books to write.
    - carapace 11y ago
      Yes, all of the above. This wasn't so bad when our reach was less, but today with Siri-like things being built into Barbie dolls it seems we should be spending more time thinking deeply before we chase that dollar, eh? (P.S. I'm a fan of your Earley Parser Explained post. Kudos, great job!)
- 11y ago

tremon 11y ago

At the time MS was sued IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure Meh. IE was the browser with the best website compatibility, because Microsoft went out of its way to reimplement half of the HTML standard in its own way, and could use the prevalence of IE to make webdevelopers follow "their" flavour of HTML. Mozilla's first Firefox release came with the slogan "take back the web". That motto had nothing to do with the excellence of IE.

jerf 11y ago
IE4 was head and shoulders above Netscape 4. IE4 is recognizably a modern browser (by introducing .innerHTML), if a very poor one by modern standards; Netscape 4 was hackery on an engine taken way beyond what it could sustain. Netscape require a long time to catch up, and the helping hand Microsoft gave by slowing down dev on IE round about IE6. There was a long window where IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure and I'm pretty sure it overlapped this lawsuit, though my brain and the calendar don't always get along perfectly. You can argue that IE was that good due to Microsoft being able to leverage its monopoly to develop something for free they could never have afforded to develop otherwise, since that argument basically won in a court of law give or take some nuances. But, in the meantime, IE really was a better browser for a good long time.
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  You mean mosaic by Spyglass Inc which was rebranded IE? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29 MS has been massively rebranding external products since the beginning and owe part of its excellency to their dominant self enforcing position using smartly the invention of Bill Gates: proprietary software and smart use of Intellectual Monopoly. A little strings will also show you quite a few "Berkeley source/MIT" licensed code.

pjc50 11y ago

PDAs (which is really where smartphones come from, not cellphones). It's just as much one as the other; let's not forget Symbian? At the time MS was sued IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure so customers wanted it [citation needed]! People used it because it was preinstalled.

majormajor 11y ago
Symbian also came from a PDA OS. And yeah, Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4 was pretty crappy, as was the first Netscape 6/Mozilla stuff for a few years pre-Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.