I have to disagree with the illegally obtained part. No court has found that, and to be truthful I disagree with the Judge's FOF To say that MSFT has no viable competition on the desktop (or even server) OS market is ludicrous. If the market followed these findings, the equity and debt market caps of Apple, BeOS, and Sun should drop close to zero. IF you can define the WAN called the Internet as an OS, then the wide and rapid proliferation of apps written for the Web invalidates the Judges entire foundation for the findings. Then there is his findings on Linux. The growth of Linux as a server OS and the valuation of Linux only vendors proves the judge wrong even if he narrows his definition to that of the desktop OS, for inexpensive thin servers lead to thin, OS independant, often free (which is an additional threat to MSFT), thin clients (such as nuomedia.com). This is true in both theory and actual practice - but the judge somehow missed this.
Yes, MSFT was an aggressive company, but no one is placing the blame on NSCP's problems on NSCP. NSCP is the company that priced the browser at $0 then started charging for it. NSCP is the one that diverted resources from R&D and support, which allowed MSFT to surpass Nav in quality, features and useability. NSCP is the one that refused to embrace the retail commercial Internet as a viable commercial medium (against the many warnings of the quite successful AOL mgmt.) until it was too late. NSCP should be the company owning encarta.com, expedia.com, carpoint.com, Yahoo.com and Amazon.com. They had an open gateway, guaranteed traffic, and very weak, very dependant (on their browser) traffic. NSCP had the stickiest site in existance, due to people's laziness (or ignorance) in modifying the browser defaults.
These things would have eventually led to NSCP's demise as long as there were aggressive and well funded competitors around. This is not a case of hindsight being 20/20 either. I have been saying these things since 1996. |
