Microsoft: 'We're the Victim'

[Peter]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2006, James Knott wrote:

> It's curious how MS maintains that things like Internet Explorer and
> Media Player have to be part of the operating system, when other
> companies and operating systems do just fine keeping that sort of things
> as applications, particularly when you consider that it was the tight
> binding of IE into Windows that has resulted in so many security flaws.

I think that the whole thing, lawsuit and primary motive included, is a 
kind of a closed source joke. If it had been open source, there would 
have been no difficulty in adding or deleting players at will, by 
integrators or by users. This lawsuit is an integral part of the closed 
source circus. And it is far from having reached a limit of any kind. I 
do not think that the relevant people realise that this is just a drop 
in an ocean. Yesterday it was serial comms programs and then it was 
spreadsheets and text editors and then it was browsers and now it's 
media players. Tomorrow it could be USB-powered electric toothbrushes, 
and who knows what else after that. This is an ongoing process in which 
a well-placed company uses every possible leverage to increase and 
maintain its market share.

These people are in the game for the money, not the product or its 
quality. That has passed to the second or N-th plane aeons ago. If they 
feel they will have something to gain by locking someone else out, they 
will do it. It is not called 'locking out', it is called 'integration' 
or 'safe default settings' or whatever, but it amounts to the same 
thing.

With a track record like they have, it would be logically wrong not to 
try to lock someone out. They have succeeded with this tactic in, what, 
8 cases out of 10 in the last 10 years or so.

Peter
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