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Legend11 on 11 April 2009
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Jo21 said:
Legend11 said:
It's interesting how people bash Microsoft but what other company in the same position wouldn't be doing the exact same thing they are?

Oh and the Royal Canadian Air Farce is pretty funny, I used to watch them a lot.

 

nokia have most the marketshare over 40%, but they don't have a monopoly and there is a fierce price / quality / features competition in the cellphone market.

not so much in the OS market.

I'm sure Microsoft would be more competitive if Windows only had 40% of the market.  What I'm talking about though is that some people think of Microsoft as an "evil" company because of their monopoly and business practices but any company in the same situation would likely do the same thing. 

Some might even do more, lets look at Nintendo during the monopoly they enjoyed with the NES:

"Nintendo's near monopoly on the home video game market left it with a degree of influence over the industry exceeding even that of Atari during Atari's heyday in the early 1980s. Unlike Atari, which never actively courted third-party developers (and even went to court in an attempt to force Activision to cease production of Atari 2600 games), Nintendo had anticipated and encouraged the involvement of third-party software developers—but strictly on Nintendo's terms. To this end, a 10NES authentication chip was placed in every console, and another was placed in every officially licensed cartridge. If the console's chip could not detect a counterpart chip inside the cartridge, the game would not load. Because Nintendo controlled the production of all cartridges, it was able to enforce strict rules on its third-party developers. Third-party developers were also asked to sign a contract by Nintendo that would obligate these parties to develop exclusively for the system. These extremely restricted production runs would end up damaging several smaller software developers: even if demand for their games was high, they could only produce as much profit as Nintendo allowed."

Now could you imagine the uproar if Microsoft attempted to lock out developers from using Windows unless they licensed it and could only produce an amount that Microsoft allowed?  What about if the developers were also forced to sign an agreement not to develop for any other operating system?

I guess what I'm saying is that other companies have done similar things or even worse but it seems like people want to make an example or Microsoft.