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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Robert Winchell who wrote (891)	5/11/1998 2:16:00 PM
From: Dragonfly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1600

I would love to know how you came up with this theory. In what way has the Internet grown due to anything MS did wrong? This theory is generally accepted by those who have been on the net long enough to have a wide perspective. Because Microsoft was "late to the table" the internet had time to establish significant open protocols such as HTML, SMTP, POP, FTP, MIME and Java. This allowed a large number of different clients to interact with standard servers. HP, Sun, SGI, Motorola, Apple, Qualcomm, and many others all produced products that worked on the net in an open way with each other's products. I'm talking about the time period before Microsoft had registered the microsoft.com domain name (I think that's a good indication of when MS "discovered" the net.) If Microsoft was there earlier they would have attempted to subvert these protocols. Want proof? They are attempting to subvert all of them now. Exchange/Outlook kinda supports SMTP and POP, but left in defaults causes people to send mail that's difficult to read in non-MS clients. The "wars" over HTML are pretty clear, and you notice the number of sites that use IE specific hooks, that have a relationship with MS. Good example is MSN, you want access to MS's content you have to use their browser. Microsoft's Java is not actually really Java, and violates the license agreement for Java, but it will run some Java software, but not all, forcing people to write their java applications to the MS version of java, thereby subverting the standard. Etc, etc. This is anti-competitive by definition. Dragonfly

To: Robert Winchell who wrote (891)	5/11/1998 4:42:00 PM
From: P.T.Burnem	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1600

Now they are trying to take control over the Internet that has prospered in no small part due to Microsoft's technological backwardness and shortsightedness. I would love to know how you came up with this theory. In what way has the Internet grown due to anything MS did wrong? The Internet's proliferation is owed to the fact I. protocols were designed to be platform-independent. Had Microsoft not (nearly) missed the I. bandwagon, they would have stuffed it with proprietory gotchas making it difficult for non-Wintel platforms to maintain I. connectivity.