Microsoft Hatred FAQ

[John Bokma]

riplin at Azonic.co.nz wrote:

> 
> John Bokma wrote:
> 
>> No: the historical fact is that MS whiped Netscape of the planet.
> 
> By giving IE away for free, by ripping off spyglass, by _paying_ OEMs
> to not include Netscape. By bundling IE. By abusing standards.

Which standards? Again: w3c is not an official standards organization.
Moreover, Netscape added LiveScript, oh wait, I mean JavaScript, and the
*cough* blink element. 

> By
> contracting with sites to include non-standard IE features to
> deliberately break NS.

NS also added features to HTML.

>> That
>> you come up with "They were afraid that everybody would be running NS
>> Office online using Netscape" is just a guess.
> 
> No. Netscape had announced that they were working on building network
> applications that just required a browser. XUL is the latest version
> of this.

So, uhm, 8 years later? And what applications do run on the web?

>> MS just seems to ignore a certain development for some time, then
>> state it's not significant, and next they are an important player.
>> This is not limited to "MS missed the Internet, almost...". They
>> don't miss anything, they just don't jump on every hype.
> 
> No. You are wrong again. In edition 1 of "The Way Ahead" there was
> _no_ mention of the Internet. MS did not notice it,

IIRC MS was already using the Internet (for email, Usenet, etc).

> and when they did they
> attempted to replace it with MSN which did not link to the internet
> initially. MSN was free with Win95, but most users ignored it and
> downloaded Netscape.

Yup, which if it had worked, it would have been an excellent lock in.
Not all plans work, NS is a nice example. 

>> and next they are an important player
> 
> Once they notice that there is a revenue stream then they will buy in
> a product, rebrand it MS and claim it is the best, and use their
> monopoly leverage to drive the other players out of business so that
> they can have all the revenue.

So what's new? Can you name all CD burning programs Adaptec has bought?

> The only reason that Linux/OpenOffice/GIMP/Apachee/MySQL/.. have
> survived this process is that MS haven't worked out how to kill them
> off.  Natural selection at work. If MS kills off everything that it
> can then what is left is what it can't.

That's why they are careful with killing off.

-- 
John                   Small Perl scripts: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
               Perl programmer available:     http://castleamber.com/
                                        I ploink googlegroups.com :-)