jpanhalt

That's arguable! Check out the 2002 anti-trust case brought by the US Department of Justice against MS. The case was brought before that, but settled in 2002, as I recall.

MS, through its very good attorneys, was able to make the US government back down. MS got a mild slap on the wrist, if that, for its illegal activities and monopolistic practices.

John

3v0

The first perhaps worst blow was when IBM went with intel instead of Motorola for the original PC.

I am not sure how much better off we would be without MS. If another company managed to corner the market we would be in a similar place. If that did not happen we would have several flavors of software that did not play together. Any software developer can tell you what a pain it is to develop for multiple platforms. It would take time to make all the flavors play nice and that would retard development too.

Backwards compatibility has always been a big selling point at MS. As a sales tool it is great. People love it. However it is a major impediment to technology advancement .

In spite of the actions of their legal department and management there are a lot of regular people at MS trying to do a good job. It is a big ship and it takes a lot of room to change direction.

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jpanhalt

There is no question about that in my mind. In fact, I just recently switched from WordPerfect to Word. I had been a loyal WP user since before ver. 5.0 (DOS). But, even MS's service is better than Corel, in my experience.

The anti-trust claim had little to do with market share per se. It had to do with monopolistic and anti-competitive practices. The linking of products, such as Microsoft I.E. with Windows, so that other products (e.g., Netscape) could not be used is illegal. That practice is a management decision and was probably made at the highest level, because everyone in any sort of business knows it is illegal.

In no way did I intend my comment to reflect negatively on the thousands of good workers at Microsoft.

John