The monopoly case against MS was bullshit. They had all kinds of bad business practices to go after and they decided to go after them for including a web browser in the OS. They fucking made the whole process a waste of time.
Pressure on their web browser monopoly was necessary because IE6 was stifling entire industry. From a legal point of view it’s not illegal to be a monopoly but to abuse that position so there isn’t that much you can do about it, especially in the US. Going after operating system or office suite monopoly should have been done but matters less and less these days.
MS prevented you from using other browsers by using vendor lock-in. It was a prime example example of now misunderstood concept of embrace, extend, extinguish. You could download Mozilla Phoenix but you couldn’t use it for everything because CSS rendering in IE was so detached from standards. On top of that you had ActiveX which meant you HAD to use Windows for some websites.
The monopoly case against MS was bullshit. They had all kinds of bad business practices to go after and they decided to go after them for including a web browser in the OS. They fucking made the whole process a waste of time.
Pressure on their web browser monopoly was necessary because IE6 was stifling entire industry. From a legal point of view it’s not illegal to be a monopoly but to abuse that position so there isn’t that much you can do about it, especially in the US. Going after operating system or office suite monopoly should have been done but matters less and less these days.
I reject that idea. The argument is that users are too stupid. MS never prevented me from installing and using Chrome or Firefox or any other browser.
MS prevented you from using other browsers by using vendor lock-in. It was a prime example example of now misunderstood concept of embrace, extend, extinguish. You could download Mozilla Phoenix but you couldn’t use it for everything because CSS rendering in IE was so detached from standards. On top of that you had ActiveX which meant you HAD to use Windows for some websites.