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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DiViT who wrote (14190)	11/17/1997 9:21:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Respond to of 24154

>>>Gates' Internet Fiction... abcnews.com <<< This writer Moody must be a real... The fact that Microsft had as usual decided to move into the product areas of the internet networking software providers has nothing to do with the current debate. History: Trumpet and a couple of dozen others were all selling mutually incompatible and generally half-baked versions of TCP/IP stacks as add-ons to DOS and Windows for a long time. These generally included some part of the standard Unix tcp utility text-based program set, like telnet and gopher and ftp. Users (like me) were screaming about the incompatibilities and were generally happy when Microsoft finally started to support tcp/ip in it's networking software. For years we had been crippled in our efforts to do distributed applications because they had tried to shove the brain-dead netbios/netbuei combo (proprietary, of course) down our throats. Netbuei was incapable of doing WANs properly, or interfacing with most Unix computers (though Sun had a project going to do Netbuei for Solaris interfacing, which they dropped when MS did tcp/ip.) TCP/IP is a government invented and supported standard, and had nothing to do with Microsoft incorporating proprietary networking features in their networking software or OS. Rather, the developments were a victory of openness over Microsoft's proprietary Netbuie software, (and IBM as well, their partner in that.) Later the government funded the development of the internet browser, HTML and so on became open standards, and for a while we were happy in a non-Microsoft, non-proprietary world. By putting IE directly into the OS, MS is trying to re-establish the proprietary lock it once had on networking protocols in MS shops. Ironically, they are trying to represent, (apparently, alledgedly...), the moment they were forced to accept open standards into Windows networking (putting in tcp/ip, gopher, etc) as the moment that the government should have realized they were going to try again for this proprietary lock: being able to shut out the competition by having IE in the operating system. I guess the government maybe should have realized that, but in the sense that compulsive bad behaviour is hard to control. But on the basis of this open technology being incorporated into Windows, one in all seriousness would hardly have been led directly to the conclusion that Microsoft would one day buy, enhance, and deploy a free html browser in such a way as to kill off competition. And if you did, you might be restricted to waiting for the offence to occur before acting. I may be wrong. But I'm sure you folks will correct me. Cheers, Chaz