may be not
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| Author | Content |
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| rittmey Mar 27, 2006 3:21 AM EDT |
I am not so sure whether I'd like to see MS broken up. I agree, that I've never quite understood why MS got away another time. I also agree that MS gets a lot of political backing - most probably due to lobbying and the odd amount of money spend from time to time. So, in the past, I was a proponent of breaking up Microsoft. But nowadays? The monopoly is getting more and more into their own way. They get into legal trouble all over the world. That combined with unpleasant experiences while using their software makes more and more people rather grumpy. The success of firefox proves that quite a lot people are willing to switch if the alternative seems to be working properly (the perceived value is most important here. IMHO Mozilla has been no worse than firefox so the sudden success was rather strange. The same applies to linux which is still attributed to be complicated and troublesome). Furthermore concerning the legal troubles: The official reaction of MS in the legal fight here in the EU furthermore adds to them appearing arrogant and unwilling to accept anything else than their own standards. I guess the very unhelpful comment to withdraw Windows if sued in Korea doesn't bode well with the Koreans (government and population alike) either. Furthermore Microsoft is fat and immobile due to their monopoly and their desperate attempt to combine more and more products in order to keep their monopoly. That's our biggest chance. Vista get's delayed and bloated mostly because of that. Six years? For what actually? Everything that really would have been an improvement got cancelled - quite some time ago. Add to this the complex bureaucracy of Microsoft and their divisions - the internal fights about positions, gratifications and whateever. Then I must say: They are much more vulnerable as big and fat as they are than they would be as a bunch of much more agile companies. And this will eventually help Free Software a lot. There is one thing that is a pity though: MS being monolistic makes it european (BTW: I myself am from Germany), asian and south- and middle-american nationalists easy to point at Microsoft for the wrong reasons. These nationalists damn MS but they actually mean the United States. And though I think there is nothing wrong with _favouring_ regional products over others I do not approve of cheap talk against MS while at the same time protecting national players of our own. --> Added somewhat later - due to an articel linked at digg (should be on lxer as well): Even the NYTimes argues today a little bit along similar lines. You can find the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/technology/27soft.html This article adds the complexity that is caused due to backwards compatibility (due to my experience of unsupported hardware in XP I am not sure whether this argument is actually valid). Nevertheless this very last line of the article sums it up nicely: 'Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.' |
| tadelste Mar 27, 2006 4:39 AM EDT |
rittmey: I won't immediately confuse the dislike people have for Microsoft with the dislike they have for the US. In this country some poeple consider Microsoft the ugliest American of them all. |
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