<Just out of curiosity, what *is* the technical rationale for what they are doing? How is it cheaper and/or better for the consumer if the two are inextricably intertwined?>
Gerry, MSFT has a LOT of points in its favor throughout this entire dispute. If the DOJ wanted to bring MSFT down, they should have picked somtehing that had much more factual "meat." Sure, they can win this in the sensalitionist media, the political arena, and the "I hate MSFT techie" crowd, but when revealing the pure facts, MSFT is right. I am sure there are aspects which would have been easier to win than this one.
For instance, the technical reason for doing what they are doing is anagous to the technicial reason for NSCP bundling mail clients with Navigator, to make a "whole" package that creates a smooth, ubiquitous product and experience for the end user. Most end users don't like to go hunting for the best roduct, they want to boot there machine and start using it, period. MSFT realizes this, so does NSCP. NSCP, like MSFT, never prevented anybody from using a competing product. Therefore, it is unnecessary to force them to extricate thier bundled code. If you don't like it, don't use it, period. Therefore, there is a reason to beleive that this entire ordeal is a witch hunt. The only possible reason for wanting to remove these files as an ultimatum, is to conserve an extra 10 mb of disk space (out of an average fo 4.5 Gb!). Most people are wasting more than this in lost adn wandering .TMP and .BAK files scattered throughout thier system. Do you mean to tell me that the governemet should start regulating free disk space. It is coming soon!! I know the Israeli, erupean, Indian and Asian software vendors are hoping the gov't. puts the Whammy on MSFT so they can tach the U.S. how "unconcentrated" the power in the software techology can really get. |
