pcworld.com — Microsoft remains the target of various antitrust charges, but the software giant may have become too weak to bully the technology market. Eight years ago this week, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of the U.S. District Court of Washington, D.C., officially declared Microsoft a monopoly. These days, the company is still fighting, and losing...
Nov 9, 2007 View in Crawl 4
theblacknightNov 10, 2007
Why is parent being dugg down? He is correct; I've replaced fans, hard drives, RAM, and batteries with non-Apple parts. Furthermore, you can run whatever OS you want on a Mac; your only real complaint is that you can't run OS X on any other computer. Oh, and I'm sensing you have something against the iPod, but I'm not really sure what it is because you can't reprogram the Zune either.
nekiruhsNov 11, 2007
Do we need to compare found exploits between IE 7 and Firefox 2? Can you even objectify that statement? All I see is subjective content. eg. Prove it.
nekiruhsNov 11, 2007
I'm going to say that neither is really better. From a functional standpoint Vista is superior. From a hardware it is flawed and worse/slower than XP. Security wise, it is better, even superior to XP, but still not as good as GNU/Linux. And from a ethical/moral standpoint, Vista is horrible. The DRM, Protected Media Path, the phone homes, WGA are all horrible. XP has good speed (Its older, what can we expect). Security in XP is a joke. And from an ethical/moral standpoint its so so, WGA is an annoyance, but it wont deactivate my legal computer, little DRM if any. So I use XP for ethical reasons, when I'm not on Ubuntu. I only use XP for games and my Zune (Surprisingly good product from MS's Zune Team).
prophasiNov 12, 2007
That's just economically wrong; 95% market share is not a monopoly -- that's just an arbitrary statement. In fact, 100% market share doesn't necessarily signify a monopoly (though it could -- and likely would), since there could be 10 competitors on the shelves whose products all suck. The key is this. Monopolies are bad because it means consumers have no recourse for that type of product if the company triples its price, lowers its quality, adds restrictive contracts, and whatever other bad stuff you want to throw in there. We'd "have" to buy it anyway, because it's the only game in town. If MS did that across the board: we use Firefox or Safari on a Mac or Linux or Solaris; we use OpenOffice or Google apps or ThinkFree or Zoho or perhaps a dozen other office suites; we play Wii and PS3 and ditch Xbox; we buy Logitech mice and keyboards; we use Java or another lang to code, in Eclipse or some other IDE; and so on.In short, for any given MS product, we have plenty of options to switch to if MS holds theirs for ransom. It's not brute force that has given them 95% market share (which, as zeebo points out, they don't even have anymore); it's our choice. And we can choose to move elsewhere at any time.
prophasiNov 12, 2007
So I buy the $200 Wal-Mart PC running Linux...how am I paying for Windows, exactly?
Closed AccountNov 22, 2007
M$ never was a monopoly. Anyone could have inserted a disk with another operating system or web browser when first buying a computer and not touched Windows or IE, ever.
fancyjFeb 11, 2008
you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. stop while you're behind.