On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Jon Biddell wrote:
> 4. Re: the anti-trust case - no-one forced people to buy Windows - they
> could have used CPM, Unix, OS/2, etc. etc. etc. Windows became the
> "standard" because people liked it.
Not so, a key issue in the anti-trust case was that Microsoft put
illegal pressure on OEMs to bundle windows, and include it in the
price. Many customers got very little choice in the matter, and this
helped windows become the dominant consumer platform it is today. And as
you correctly pointed out, like all M$ products it got where it did at
least somewhat based on marketing, which is not quite the same as
"consumers liked it".
> Where M$ fscked up is when they released Windows 3.0 - originally, Windows
> was a run-time environment for Ventura (I think - may have been PageMaker).
> When WordPerfect came to them and said "We like your O/S - we want to make
> our software run under it", M$ should have said "No, we sell WORD as a WP
> program - go write your own GUI - in fact, we'll make damn sure it WON'T
> run under Windows". Yes, they wpould have been relying on the "strength"
> of Word to win over WP users.
>
> Nothing illegal in that....
Maybe not in this country, but in the US there is plenty illegal about
it. They did a less harsh version of that to Netscape, and that was
definately ruled illegal.
cheers,
Martin
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
