scott wrote:

> Do you also 
> think Coca-Cola is wrong for banning pubs and restaurants from selling 
> Pepsi?

Yes. (It's news to me that they can legally do this...)

>  Or Ford for banning its dealers from selling other cars?

That's not quite the same thing.

Windows is slightly unusual in that it's a product that goes with 
another product (but the other product is useless without it - or some 
other manufacturer's equivilent). The only analogy I can come up with is 
Goodyear ordering Ford not to sell cars that have tires that aren't 
Goodyear, and then trying to ban the sale of cars without tires. 
[Admittedly, a rather lame analogy.]

>> In summary, Microsoft's dominant market position exists because they 
>> carefully and systematically prevent consumers from having any choice.
> 
> That doesn't make sense at all, to get to their dominant market position 
> it must have been because of something they did in the past, when people 
> were all going out to buy DOS or Windows 3.1 or whatever.

According to the history books, the story goes that IBM wanted an OS, 
Gate's mum knew somebody at IBM, so Gates stole an OS off one of his 
mates and made it work on the IBM PC. IBM PCs became popular for some 
reason, and the rest is history.

> I suspect it 
> was just because at the time they had the "best" product, Linux was 
> probably too complicated and Amigas and Macs were probably too expensive 
> and inflexible (hardware-wise).  Don't blame MS that nobody could 
> provide any decent competition back then.

I doubt that was the reason.

>> ...but mostly I hate them because they charge extortionate prices for 
>> a product which isn't actually very good. :-P
> 
> TBH, when you compare the complexity of Windows with other software, the 
> price seems perfectly acceptable to me, in fact it seems quite a bargain.

I wasn't referring only to Windows; M$ make other products as well. 
(Most notably Office, but also things like VisualStudio, IIS, Exchange, 
SQL Server, etc.) Other people manage to make similar products which 
work significantly better, and for a fraction of the money that M$ has 
available for investment. It's just that for M$, it's cheaper to cheat 
the system than to design a better product.

> I would hope so.  And also I would hope that if the Windows market share 
> dropped, it would then be legal again for them to include a browser and 
> media player, and to cease having to share their secrets with competitors.

It's news to me that Microsoft does have to share their secrets.

>> Last time I checked, Google doesn't have a desktop OS...
> 
> But they seem one of the most likely candidates at the moment to have 
> any significant impact on Windows sales...

Sure. The only other possibility I see is Apple, and they won't.

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