Do you approve of the EU fine for MS?

[Umfriend]

Only two MS products really impressed me.....Excel and their MS Sidewinder Precision Pro joysticks.

Seriously now, this has nothing to do with who has better products, whether they plagiarise anything or not etc. It is about tying.

Chuck, which drivers? HW drivers are, AFAIK, written by hardware manufacturers. Certainly, loads of non-MS programs use libraries/funtions written by MS that may not qualify as "OS". The thing is, they did create these. They did not however compete with alternatives and as such there was no market to seek to dominate. They were there first.

With IE and WMP however, it can be argued that they tried to change what is supposed to be in an OS, if only to drive others out. That is what is called tying, is what they were charged with and what EU has found them guilty of.

[GNEP]

Originally posted by Umfriend
Only two MS products really impressed me.....Excel and their MS Sidewinder Precision Pro joysticks.

Well I'd definitely agree with you on Excel (although it still doesn't do everything I want it to as even now it doesn't cope with data arrays with more than 2.5 dimensions ) The joysticks though, whilst nicely built, really didn't want to play ball with win2k (winXP seems OK so far...)

Microsoft mice and keyboards though are surprisingly good.

[dZeus]

Originally posted by Brian Ellis
Sorry, I can't agree with you there. An operating system should be an operating system and not a software suite containing browsers, e-mail clients, word processors, media players, or ANYTHING that is not directly required to operate it.

Put it this way: one can buy all sorts of accessories that turn an electric drill into a grinder, a saw, a polisher, a wood lathe and goodness knows what other things it was never designed to do. None of these work as well as proper tools designed to do that job. So it is with Windows. When Gates & Co. saw that Netscape was cornering the market on browsers and e-mail clients, what did they do? They added a poor imitation of them into Windows, then pretended that they were an essential part of the O/S. When they saw Real was cornering the media player market (albeit with a horrible software), they started to offer WMP as part of Windows (with which it has no relationship). The sad thing is that the MS stuff is never as good as the purpose-built software (just look at Outlook/Outlook Express, if you don't believe me). So, they are adding accessories to Windows which do not work as well as the purpose-built tools but, by so doing, they are reducing the revenue of the real innovators and thereby stifling innovation.

MS is not a company of innovators; they are just plagiarists of what other people are better at, starting with Windows (the original thinking came from Xerox Corp.) and even DOS, which was an extension of an earlier system whose name has slipped my memory. Their apps are the same: Word was born out of the success of WordPerfect, which lost out when they couldn't integrate it into Windows, through MS not communicating to them some essential O/S data). If they can't copy, they buy the innovators out (cf. FrontPage).

so you want people to use the equivalent of a linux kernel for windows, and let everything else be bought seperately?

[cjolley]

Originally posted by Umfriend
Certainly, loads of non-MS programs use libraries/funtions written by MS that may not qualify as "OS". The thing is, they did create these. They did not however compete with alternatives and as such there was no market to seek to dominate. They were there first.

With IE and WMP however, it can be argued that they tried to change what is supposed to be in an OS, if only to drive others out. That is what is called tying, is what they were charged with and what EU has found them guilty of.

1, Why should MS leave those libraries in a version of windows they have been forced to take thier MM front end out of? After all, MS wrote those libs for thier own front end. Let the other companies write thier own if they want to force Windows users to have to buy thier products.

2, Drive other companies out of what?
MS does not charge anything for IE or WMP.

chuck

[Brian Ellis]

Originally posted by GNEP

Microsoft mice and keyboards though are surprisingly good.

Haven't used MS keyboards, but I had some Intellimouse optical abortions. They are built with a very sharp 90° bend where their tails enter their bodies, with no strain relief. They suffer from caudal dislocations after typically one year of intensive use. As the Logitech equivalents had an unacceptably stiffer cable, I've been using the Logitech optical wireless beasties for almost two years: much better than the MS although they are heavy on AA batteries, ~2/month each.

Of course, Microsoft don't make their peripheral hardware themselves. Maybe that is why they are good. They don't support them, either. My first caudal dislocation occurred after about 10 months: no guarantee replacement, despite a design fault.

Brian

[Brian Ellis]

Originally posted by dZeus
so you want people to use the equivalent of a linux kernel for windows, and let everything else be bought seperately?

Why not? Sounds good to me. It's what we did before Windows bloatware came along. In fact, Windows sat on top of the O/S up to W98SE (or was it ME?), but even had to be bought separately up to v. 3.11. - Windows was a GUI application and not an O/S, then, but could run on a 386 25 MHz with 1 Mb RAM almost as fast, as far as ordinary office type apps are concerned, on a 3 GHz P4 with 1 Gb RAM under XP. Anyway, no one can type faster because of this bloatware. WordPerfect 5.2 for DOS was the best word processor, ever. OK, it didn't have all the fancy gimmicks that modern ones have, but it did what 98% of real users wanted and, under MS-DOS 5 or 6.2, it never crashed or did anything unpredictable. Furthermore, it took only about 2.5 Mb of hard disk space. Compare that with the 150 Mb or so that MS Office or the 275 Mb that WordPerfect takes today. This is not progress: it is the IT equivalent of the gas-guzzler mentality - if it's bigger, it's better.

[piaxVirus]

If you had a great idea for an application that applies to the consumer market and you can see becoming very popular. Would you even both? I am not sure I would anymore. I would probably scrap the idea and think of something that caters to a smaller market.

If you decided to go though with developing the application. First you would have to go through the hassle of setting up a company and raise financing to keep youself and your company afloat until the application is released. Then advertise to get your name out there. If your application becomes popular enough to start making a profit off of, you will then appear on Microsoft's radar. After that happens it's all down hill.

These days, the thing to do would be to setup a dumb company, patent the idea, wait for someone else (preferably Microsoft) to develop the application, then sue.

[GuchiGuh]

I like MS
Windows XP Is very good In my opinion

[spadnos]

@DZeus: There should be a compiler also. Funny that they don't even consider giving away a program that lets you make the computer do WHATEVER you might want to do. Even MS used to provide a BASIC interpreter with DOS (MS began as a provider of BASIC language interpreters for TRS-DOS (I think - it could have been CP/M) ), but they stopped around version 6.22.

@Brian Ellis: CP/M, I believe.

@UmFriend / GNEP: Supposedly, OpenOffice now supports all Excel functions. I've been using OOo for a while, and the only thing that doesn't work well is getting other people to use it

@UtwigMU: Although MS Paint is basically crap, they do have some document imaging and photo processing software with Windows (MS Imaging on Win2k). They suck for any real work. There are also two word processors (3 if you count "edit" at the command prompt) - Notepad and Windows Write.

The idea behind an operating system is to insulate programmers from the specifics of hardware, and to provide a consistent environment for users.

Anything else is just fluff.

Both Linux and Windows include a lot of fluff.

The problem with media programs being included with Windows is that the means of generating the media, and the format of the media files, is decided by Microsoft. Nobody can make a Windows Media 9 file without licensing the technology from Microsoft. Of course, there is no royalty fee if you make a Windows program that uses WM9. If you make an embedded system (a DVD player, for instance), there are pretty huge fees. (like $1million/year) If you make software for a non-Windows OS, you have to pay royalties.

(note - the WM format license fees are actually lower than MPEG-4, but the MP4 fees don't change depending on the OS you target)

Of course, since 90% of the world's PCs run Windows, many websites will only provide Windows Media files, making the sites unusable with non-Windows OSes. Linux users won't be able to view the trailers for upcoming movies, for instance.

That's the problem of MS distributing applications with Windows - it's the lock-in to their proprietary file formats that really gets you.

- Steve

[GNEP]

Haven't tried OOo since version 1.1 - and let's just say that for the types of spreadsheets I build, it doesn't cut the mustard. Not saying that for 99.999% of users it's not good enough, but still...

[Kooldino]

So where does that money go anyway? It should go to the consumers in the form of a rebate.

[Umfriend]

Tried OOo a while back, when they licensed VBA for it, but at that time, the VBA did not interface with the actual spreadsheet......go figure.

[dZeus]

Imho, this conclusion from the EU does the following:

it encourages people to code very very crappy software for something that's in windows. For example, a file manager! (windows explorer). Next, try to sell it. Of course nobody will buy it, because it's crap.. but hey! there's this solution, called whining to the EU! MS integrated a file manager into Windows, just to try and drive you out of business! stop them!

[Drizzt]

I find this really really stupid.

[UtwigMU]

There are lot's of things that MS can be criticized for, but IMO bundling media player isn't one of them.

On the other hand adding shop for music from media player pointing to their site or subsidiary would be problematic.