Microsoft ends 10 year fight with EU.

[jkimball]

loves2splooge said:

So basically M$ needs to be forced to bundle browsers from their competitors on Windows to encourage competition just because there are people out there who are ignorant of a better alternative? Firefox is getting pretty mainstream and has 32% marketshare. There are hot chicks I know (who aren't computer geeks by any stretch of the imagination) who use Firefox. Firefox is not just a thing within the open-source movement anymore. The mainstream is using it. If someone can't figure out what the other options are, it's their own fault. The options are very easy to find. More nanny state BS from the EU government.

EU are a bunch of hypocrites. "Oh let's go after M$ for their "monopoly" (when IE only owns 60% or so of the web browser market now) while Apple has a complete hardware monopoly on the Mac platform. The Mac is a closed platform (almost like a console even except you don't need to pay licensing fees to Apple if you want to create software to run on their hardware and OS), unlike the PC and yet you don't see the EU government going after them. It's become the hip arthouse indie "rebel" thing to bash M$ and like Mac even though their practices are more anti-competitive than M$ (by having a closed platform).

I fully support the open-source movement (short of installing Linux. Because not all pieces of software I use are supported by Linux). But what's happening to M$ is completely unfair. How about the EU go down hard on Apple for a change?

You were using Firefox in 2004?  Before it existed? That's amazing! Were there hot chicks back then too? Did they actually exist or were they also figments of your imagination?

Do you how hard FF had to work to get 32% to overcome the microsoft's forced bundling? Do you think that was fair?

The entire 9 pages of this thread completly miss the point. Sad, really. I was hoping that VGC members would do a little more thinking before they post. The fact is, five years ago - before firefox was even released - Microsoft jammed IE down everyone's throat by abusing their windows monopoly. (a monopoly Apple does not have, and sure as heck didn't have back then as they were almost dead at the time!). Thus IE crushed all competitive browsers, and took over the internet. Microsoft did this delibrately, knowing full well it was illegal.  Now it's five years later, and the trial is over - and MSFT should not be punished? At all? So if you do something illegal, generate massive profits from it*, and get away with it that is OK, now and forever?

Sigh.

 

* by using a non-standards compliant browser, they essentially forced the internet to be rewrirtten to the IE standard. They sold, literaly, billions of dollars of IIS servers, Tool sets and dev kits during this time. Billions, kids. Billions.