I got no problem agree with that, Jerry ( The dispute with Microsoft is over their business model ). I understand the issue well enough, even if I make fun of it sometimes. Standard Microsoft business practice, and all that. Microsoft must leverage the monopoly, to extend its dominance into new areas.
To briefly get a tiny bit serious (it's hard not to be sarcastic), there's a few, um, inconsistencies there. There's the continuous chant "Windows is what the market has chosen", where Windows the OS is whatever Microsoft chooses to put on the disk. Therefore, the market has already chosen Windows98, before it's even officially available, because that's what will ship with PCs and be available in the stores. Integrated IE, WebTV, and whatever other random stuff that's in there is suddenly "what the consumers want", like the consumers wanting the nearly 3 year old retail Windows release up till now. I find this definition of the invisible hand odd.
There's other problems, like the "everybody loves a gorilla" theory that says "the market" wants and needs Microsoft to tell everybody where they want to go today, but I'm slipping too far into sarcasm already so I'll stop.
I don't know if a negotiated outcome would be possible under the best of circumstances. But the 11th-hour negotiations were pretty suspicious right from the start. The "grass roots" PR defense seems odd to me, again given the many obvious contradictions and inconsistencies, but maybe that's the only way they can fight the battle. Or maybe it's just my small mind. I still find it strange that Microsoft managed to make antitrust this really big story, their partner in the cohort Intel has a very different approach.
Cheers, Dan. |
