Voice your opinions on the MS settlement

Discussion in 'General Software' started by syngod, Nov 2, 2001.

  1. syngod

    syngod Moderator

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    Feel free to express your opinions on the terms of the settlement between the DOJ and MS, whether good or bad :).

    Personally I feel they are a little strong, while most people will probably disagree with me if you look at similar companies that are using similar practices they seem to be able to get away with it but MS tries to do anything and the state attorney generals are down their backs.

    I won't name any companies with similar business tactics **cough cough AOL cough cough** yet you don't see them having restrictions placed against them for bundling extra software with their programs or trying to take over a deafult programs place.

    The majority of what Microsoft has added has helped both the economy and consumers. How many people would be using the internet today if yout still had to pay to use Netscape and no IE existed. In XP I've heard many people complaining the integrated firewall, cd burning and zip file management will hurt software makers of those types of programs. However if you look at what MS is offering it's fairly basic and not something most users would be relying on, how many of you have to burn a bin/cue file or a discjuggler image, since MS can't do it the majority of companies are safe.

    For firewalls the XP FW is really no threat to comapnies like Zone Labs or Black Ice, it will help consumer by offering inbound protection but it's not a full fledge firewall that can protect both in/out traffic so those companies are safe. And as for the zip programs how many of you would be willing to give up your copy of winzip or winrar to rely solely on the XP/ME solution.

    Except for Win Messenger everything MS has done has in some way I feel benefitted the consumer while not seriously affecting the competition. After all if it wasn't for Netscape falling behind so badly they would probably still have a decent market share today, the only side effect MS had was forcing NS to quit charging for Navigator which benefited consumers.

    The majority of problems companies are complaining about are because they've fallen behind to better technology and need some way to justify it. After all WMP has been around for quite awhile and I still see RealNetworks around and despite the defrag/checkdisk utils in MS's OS's I still see quite a few companies making money in that sector. And after all just because somethings free doesn't mean people are going to use it, just take a look at Linux.

    Overall I think MS should have been able to continue with what they were doing after all they included all these new programs without substantially upping the price of each new OS, until they do that or it can be shown that they have killed a company by they're tactics and not by the fact that the competing comapny has fallen behind or makes a stupid marketing decision MS should be able to continue what they've been doing.
     
  2. Sniper

    Sniper Administrator Staff Member

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    I think MS do have an unfair advantage over other companies but as you said syngod, other companies still have allot to offer, like a faster defrag utilities etc

    Plus it would be better if there was only one browse Internet Explorer as it would make things much easier for web designers, thats my opinion though!

    Even though XP includes the ability to burn Cd’s I don’t use the feature as there are much better alternatives like Nero , Clone CD etc

    I don’t use MSN Messager, as ICQ is way better and more people use it :waycool:
     

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