5 ms·

This is worse in my opinion. In the '90s, you could argue that precedent hadn't truly been set yet. Now that case is almost common knowledge in tech. They can't

This is worse in my opinion. In the '90s, you could argue that precedent hadn't truly been set yet. Now that case is almost common knowledge in tech. They can't even pretend to have an excuse this time around. Until today, I thought "Microsoft is doing pretty good." Now I want nothing more than to see them sued/fined heavily for this. EDIT: I can see now that I wrote carelessly. By "This is worse" I meant "This is more blatantly illegal." Not "This is more detrimental to the world." The '90s browser bundling was probably much more detrimental, but not unexpected behavior. But the recent behavior was very unexpected to me. I had to use Task Manager to kill it. I can't believe Microsoft would be so bold as to not even give me some small, hard-to-read "no thanks" button somewhere.

corty 6y ago
Microsoft in the last few years managed to successfully sucker a lot of people into believing the new microsoft post-balmer is somehow reformed and better. Therefore I think its also worse because of the added deception and astroturfing campaign. I think Microsoft actually never changed a bit. They just swapped the figurehead.
- bathtub365 6y ago
  They changed. They fired their Windows QA and the quality of Windows went down even further as a result.
hinkley 6y ago
We weren't mad at Microsoft for bundling software. We were mad at them for strangling out anyone whose shadow even looked like competition. People with 10% market share are allowed to do a whole hell of a lot of things that become illegal when you have 90% market share. I suspect this is part of why monopolies are so uniformly recalcitrant. From their perspective, we didn't have problems with them doing this 10 years ago, why are we upset about it now when they have assets worth taking away as a punishment? It's just a money grab. They're just winning and we're just jealous. If I own a grocery store, I'm selling formula for below cost to get people into my store. It's called a Loss Leader. If I'm the biggest formula maker in the world, and I sell formula below cost, that's called Dumping and I will be fined and punished if anyone can prove that I am 'too big' and that this is driving competition out of business.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  If there are major economies of scale to a business, what if it's optimal to have a duopoly, regulated of course to prevent collusion? Maybe we need to have more of a system for directly dealing with that situation.
  - thatguy0900 6y ago
    I think right now it's just optimal to have a duopoly because it protects the bigger guy from getting in trouble for being a monopoly, and secures the little guy all the leftovers. like Microsoft saving Apple from bankruptcy or Google paying firefoxs bills.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mrlala 6y ago
>Now I want nothing more than to see them sued/fined heavily for this. Do you also want Apple and Google to be sued for "bundling" their browsers on iphone/osx/android/chomebook etc?
- default-kramer 6y ago
  I don't care about the bundling. I care that I already chose Firefox as my default browser, but Microsoft tried to force me to choose Edge instead. There was no "no thanks" button. I had to use Task Manager to kill it.
esperent 6y ago
I don't understand why Microsoft gets such a hard time over this when in IOS you can't even install another browser engine aside from Safari. If you do install Firefox on IOS it's just a wrapper for the Safari engine with all the same limitations, you can't install adblock or other extensions. That seems far more anti-competitive that what MS is doing here and it's been happening as long as IOS has existed.
- vetinari 6y ago
  Apple has some 25% market share on mobile devices . Microsoft has 80% on desktop; they had some 98% in '90s. That's the crucial difference. You can easily get native firefox on mobile if you want (even if it means giving up iOS). It was much more difficult for desktop users to give up Windows in 1998.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    And when given the option, the wonderful Desktop Linux never goes beyond 1%, as per Valve stats, but everyone will migrate en mass just about now (since XP apparently).
    - vetinari 6y ago
      That's entirely different issue, that doesn't have technical roots. The world didn't migrate en-masse to Windows Phone either, despite it being quite nice mobile OS at the time.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Sure it has, a fragmentation and continuous forking of major desktop stacks that don't allow ISVs to thrust the platform. WP also doing slowly well, the whole technical stack was rebooted multiple times, and thus it lost the developer love that got fed up with so many reboots. Also the reason why Win32 and WinRT are now being merged via Project Reunion, confirming the trend that started with MSIX and XAML Islands introduction.
oehpr 6y ago
>believe Microsoft would be so bold as to not even give me some small, hard-to-read "no thanks" button somewhere. I will never ever forget the time they considered closing a nag popup (that they installed through security updates) by hitting the X in the top right as consent for an operating system upgrade. That was depraved. To this day, I don't know how people could forgive them for that. Like... look at this incident in comparison. They installed a browser. That's nothing.

corty 6y ago

Microsoft in the last few years managed to successfully sucker a lot of people into believing the new microsoft post-balmer is somehow reformed and better. Therefore I think its also worse because of the added deception and astroturfing campaign. I think Microsoft actually never changed a bit. They just swapped the figurehead.

bathtub365 6y ago
They changed. They fired their Windows QA and the quality of Windows went down even further as a result.

hinkley 6y ago

We weren't mad at Microsoft for bundling software. We were mad at them for strangling out anyone whose shadow even looked like competition. People with 10% market share are allowed to do a whole hell of a lot of things that become illegal when you have 90% market share. I suspect this is part of why monopolies are so uniformly recalcitrant. From their perspective, we didn't have problems with them doing this 10 years ago, why are we upset about it now when they have assets worth taking away as a punishment? It's just a money grab. They're just winning and we're just jealous. If I own a grocery store, I'm selling formula for below cost to get people into my store. It's called a Loss Leader. If I'm the biggest formula maker in the world, and I sell formula below cost, that's called Dumping and I will be fined and punished if anyone can prove that I am 'too big' and that this is driving competition out of business.

perl4ever 6y ago
If there are major economies of scale to a business, what if it's optimal to have a duopoly, regulated of course to prevent collusion? Maybe we need to have more of a system for directly dealing with that situation.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  I think right now it's just optimal to have a duopoly because it protects the bigger guy from getting in trouble for being a monopoly, and secures the little guy all the leftovers. like Microsoft saving Apple from bankruptcy or Google paying firefoxs bills.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

mrlala 6y ago

>Now I want nothing more than to see them sued/fined heavily for this. Do you also want Apple and Google to be sued for "bundling" their browsers on iphone/osx/android/chomebook etc?

default-kramer 6y ago
I don't care about the bundling. I care that I already chose Firefox as my default browser, but Microsoft tried to force me to choose Edge instead. There was no "no thanks" button. I had to use Task Manager to kill it.

esperent 6y ago

I don't understand why Microsoft gets such a hard time over this when in IOS you can't even install another browser engine aside from Safari. If you do install Firefox on IOS it's just a wrapper for the Safari engine with all the same limitations, you can't install adblock or other extensions. That seems far more anti-competitive that what MS is doing here and it's been happening as long as IOS has existed.

vetinari 6y ago
Apple has some 25% market share on mobile devices . Microsoft has 80% on desktop; they had some 98% in '90s. That's the crucial difference. You can easily get native firefox on mobile if you want (even if it means giving up iOS). It was much more difficult for desktop users to give up Windows in 1998.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  And when given the option, the wonderful Desktop Linux never goes beyond 1%, as per Valve stats, but everyone will migrate en mass just about now (since XP apparently).
  - vetinari 6y ago
    That's entirely different issue, that doesn't have technical roots. The world didn't migrate en-masse to Windows Phone either, despite it being quite nice mobile OS at the time.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Sure it has, a fragmentation and continuous forking of major desktop stacks that don't allow ISVs to thrust the platform. WP also doing slowly well, the whole technical stack was rebooted multiple times, and thus it lost the developer love that got fed up with so many reboots. Also the reason why Win32 and WinRT are now being merged via Project Reunion, confirming the trend that started with MSIX and XAML Islands introduction.

oehpr 6y ago

>believe Microsoft would be so bold as to not even give me some small, hard-to-read "no thanks" button somewhere. I will never ever forget the time they considered closing a nag popup (that they installed through security updates) by hitting the X in the top right as consent for an operating system upgrade. That was depraved. To this day, I don't know how people could forgive them for that. Like... look at this incident in comparison. They installed a browser. That's nothing.