I anyone thinks that Microsoft Settlement in the form it was proposed is not such a good idea, here is the link on how to voice your opinion.
http://www.codeweavers.com/~jwhite/tunney.html

I really dislike the setllement, as it does nothing to prevent Microsoft from continuing its anti-competitive behaviour.
Tommorow microsoft might decide that it wants to enter into
webhosting market - and the only place were FTP command would connect from you Win XP - would be microsoft servers.

The Sad Part :(

If Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple Computer) never gave him 3 prototype Macintosh 128k's back in the 80's we would have never heard of Bill Gates, or Microsoft. We would all be using Macintosh's. I know some of you may not agree but think of this....Apple had the first GUI OS..(stolen from Xerox), now if windows was never developed there would be no GUI for the PC, maybe years later when he finaly copied them, but by then it was too late. The worst part, this is why I don't understand why people use windows, when he first released windows there were all kinds of bugs in it, he relesed it to compete with Apple before they unvailed the Macintosh. Now here is the reason why there are so many Mac Fans! Our Macs are not controled by some guy from a seperate comany, our comapny (Apple) makes the hardware and the software..now what that means is that its much easier to make an OS work properly when you also make the hardware...but if Steve Jobs never gave the Macintosh 128k to Bill Gates, you would all have a Macintosh, there would be no windows! And if there were...it would have been to late...and its all your fault that Bill Gates is so powerful, because you all bought into his little empire, the superior computer was sitting right there all the time, and you over looked it simply because you didnt understand!

Sorry....That was a rant! Im very anit-microsoft, can't you tell...you guy should rent the movie called "Pirates of Silicon Valley" it the true story about Apple and Microsoft!!!

It is a good idea for all members of web hosting industry to oppose Microsoft monopoly, even ones that offer Microsoft solution. If there is a company that has obvious power to ruin our industry in no time, it is Microsoft :(. It has an o/s that has 90% of market share. When comes the day Microsoft put a 'Host your web site on MSN' icon on their desktop, then it is doomsday for all of us. They had done this to AOL and others, and there is no reason they wouldn't do it to us, except when there is enough pressure from public and government.

"Host your website.." is not a big deal. Yet if they make it so that you would have to pay $50 a month for each client that you host using MS servers..., and make frontpage so it would work only with MS servers, and IE will start poping up a window, that the site is not hosted with IIS server, and considered insecure :).... well, they have to many places where they can strike.

Originally posted by onthecatwalk
The Sad Part :(
If Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple Computer) never gave him 3 prototype Macintosh 128k's back in the 80's we would have never heard of Bill Gates, or Microsoft. We would all be using Macintosh's

:eek: That's the sad part?

Seriously, it is ofcourse hard to say what would have happened if Microsoft had not been around but I think things would be a lot worse without them.

Say what you want about Dos/Windows but Microsoft DID create a standard. Without the standard the homepc might not have taken off like it has now.

We'ld all be using our own obscure little piece of machinery which all had problems communicating with eachother

Now everything is made Windows compatible. Software, hardware... I can send my cd with data to any of you and you can put it in your discdrive and read it.

Would this have been possible without Microsoft? I dunno...

But see, alot of people don't remeber what exactly was going on...

Apple already had a home computer..they invented it, and they had many more applications, features and stuff that a PC ever did...Apple was selling them better than anyone else...their Apple II was the first home computer and that was before Microsoft was even a company..Microsoft wasn't in the picture until the Apple Lisa was introduced (the first Macintosh, but not a Macintosh) You would all have Mac's....Microsoft did nothing but steel..the PC had little appliactions...the Mac had speach recognition before windows 2.0 cameout....everyone basically didn't notice the Mac because they saw PC's at work....and remember the Altair??? Apple Had The First Home Computer Made And Being Sold While Bill Gates was still writing software for it before he was a company!

This stuff should be tought in schools!

You are mixing compatible and uniform.

It is like saying that army would be good, simply because you don't have to have all this fashion industry

I've heard all the arguments, from Macs being faster to easier to use. They are (are were until recently) in all the schools and universities. Well, something happened as we now have more people buying slower, harder to use PC's, and say what you will, there's more than one reason for that.

Originally posted by Pilgrim
Say what you want about Dos/Windows but Microsoft DID create a standard. Without the standard the homepc might not have taken off like it has now.


That's assuming without Microsoft standards would never arise. That is a faulty premise. Take a look at TCP/IP, html, javascript, c++, perl, Java, etc.... In what major part did MS contribute to there? In fact, MS has tried to poison the standards with Java with their J++, C++ with their C#, Javascript with their Jscript and vbscript, etc...

Suppose MS never existed. Another entity or company would have come along to create and maintain standards. Why? Because there's this thing called "natural monopoly". I quoted that because it was uttered by Bill Gates himself more than a decade ago. In the computer world people enjoy having one standard, one OS, etc... so that you don't have to have a big mess to deal with. One good example is the PC hardware industry. We have components like ram, hard drives, cpus, pci, scsi, etc... and they all conform to a standard. A standard that makes it easy for us to mix and match. These are standards created by standards organizations such as IEEE for everyone's benefit.

Don't give too much credit to MS. They have not innovated that much for the world. The only way anybody can say that is if MS has created something that nobody else could've created easily had MS not been alive.

Originally posted by Pilgrim


:eek: That's the sad part?

Seriously, it is ofcourse hard to say what would have happened if Microsoft had not been around but I think things would be a lot worse without them.

Say what you want about Dos/Windows but Microsoft DID create a standard. Without the standard the homepc might not have taken off like it has now.

We'ld all be using our own obscure little piece of machinery which all had problems communicating with eachother

Now everything is made Windows compatible. Software, hardware... I can send my cd with data to any of you and you can put it in your discdrive and read it.

Would this have been possible without Microsoft? I dunno...


It is actually not Microsoft who starts PC industry, it is IBM, IBM opened their PC specification to vendors so that they could make their own IBM Compatible PC. Right now when you look inside your computer case you'll see a lot of component from different manufacturers, but yet they are working fine together because they conform to well established standard. End user vendors (compaqs, dells) have more choices to choose for their systems. For example, for home multimedia PCs, vendor could choose video card from NVidia, while for office PCs, they could have chosen video cards like ATI Rage. In turn, customers will benefit with all of this competition between vendors.

The same thing cannot be said with software side of our PC however. There is virtually no competition, almost all software that come with consumer PC is from one vendor. There is almost no choice for vendors or end users. Vendors cannot fine tune their software offerings to their specific customer target. Software prices goes higher and higher every year. All of this is caused by lack of standard, there is no standard in file formats for example. If you send a word document to me, it won't be displayed in other word processing software as well as in word. Microsoft is also the last big vendors adopting the industry standard TCP/IP and other Internet related protocols. I think if Microsoft monopoly never exists, we would still have the Internet as it is today (or better), but we would use a more diverse operating system and application, and able to communicate with each other better.