Well I was taking a normal stroll to Wikipedia to find a few plot details about Band of Brothers when I happened to glance at the news column and saw something concerning a Microsoft suit. I always had a lot of interest in the tech business and was particularly attracted to this one because it concerned Microsoft. Now I've always been a fan of Microsoft, and i don't care if 90% of the people here think Macs are better. Now back to the topic. I read through the article, albeit a bit carelessly, but I got the main points good enough.
Read the whole article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_competition_caseSeems like Microsoft was demanding a bit of money it didn't need. That I could understand, it was a very straight forward illegal bit of practice. But the next accusation wan't really so in my opinion. Sun Microsystems was complaining that Microsoft wasn't releasing enough info about it's operating system interface, so they couldn't fully integrate with it. Later the case extended to whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle their own Windows Media Player with Windows. Also the same case with Internet Explorer. While their argument has some truth in the fact that Microsoft was gaining an unfair dominance in those software sectors, in my opinion it wasn't intentional. I mean computers have two main purposes, to create content and consume content. Surfing the net gives you lots of content, stories, news, videos, pictures, etc. A media player allows you to read video and image formats. Without those, your computer just lost nearly 50% of its capability. And having those doesn't neccasarily mean they
have to use it. I mean its a lot more convenient just to stick with the default one, but as internet connections become faster and third-party browsers better, there will be a steady decline in market share. Also, Microsoft wasn't really making any money, as these software were free with no paid add-ons(as far as I know). So in the interests of the people, I think many of them would have preferred to have the bundles.
I guess Microsoft was a bit unfair in not letting other companies fully integrate their software, but hey, it
is Microsoft's own system. If they don't want to let other guys mull over their precious source code, I mean let them. They produced it, so it's a closed system. They call the shots for their own operating systems. And as said before, they did not make any money from this.
What do you guys think?