John Bokma wrote: > No: the historical fact is that MS whiped Netscape of the planet.
By giving IE away for free, by ripping off spyglass, by _paying_ OEMs to not include Netscape. By bundling IE. By abusing standards. By contracting with sites to include non-standard IE features to deliberately break NS. If an OEM was shipping Netscape on machines MS paid them $5 a copy not to. > That > you come up with "They were afraid that everybody would be running NS > Office online using Netscape" is just a guess. No. Netscape had announced that they were working on building network applications that just required a browser. XUL is the latest version of this. > MS just seems to ignore a certain development for some time, then state > it's not significant, and next they are an important player. This is not > limited to "MS missed the Internet, almost...". They don't miss > anything, they just don't jump on every hype. No. You are wrong again. In edition 1 of "The Way Ahead" there was _no_ mention of the Internet. MS did not notice it, and when they did they attempted to replace it with MSN which did not link to the internet initially. MSN was free with Win95, but most users ignored it and downloaded Netscape. > and next they are an important player Once they notice that there is a revenue stream then they will buy in a product, rebrand it MS and claim it is the best, and use their monopoly leverage to drive the other players out of business so that they can have all the revenue. The only reason that Linux/OpenOffice/GIMP/Apachee/MySQL/.. have survived this process is that MS haven't worked out how to kill them off. Natural selection at work. If MS kills off everything that it can then what is left is what it can't. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
