Yeah, I just don't see it. It takes more than one party to make an OEM agreement and I don't see a problem with Microsoft doing just as they please with their own OS, just as Apple and Google do with their own properties.
I get that people like to blame one party, but let's look at the bigger picture here: every company plays hard-ball with their own properties if they can. In my opinion, Apple and Google have been far more damaging to the software world than Microsoft had ever been. Apple because they popularized the walled-garden approach to everything and Google because they evangelize taking all control away from users by making every app web or cloud driven with zero choice.
Microsoft didn't just "play hardball"; they abused a monopoly position to extinguish competition, and they lost multiple antitrust suits because of it. The fact that other companies are misbehaving now doesn't negate the damage MS did in the 1990s. OEMs couldn't refuse MS agreements because of MS's monopoly. To an extent the computing world has recovered, so if you weren't old enough or not yet into the computing industry you might not have noticed, but the market would be way more interesting without MS's anticompetitive bullying.
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Yeah, I just don't see it. It takes more than one party to make an OEM agreement and I don't see a problem with Microsoft doing just as they please with their own OS, just as Apple and Google do with their own properties.
I get that people like to blame one party, but let's look at the bigger picture here: every company plays hard-ball with their own properties if they can. In my opinion, Apple and Google have been far more damaging to the software world than Microsoft had ever been. Apple because they popularized the walled-garden approach to everything and Google because they evangelize taking all control away from users by making every app web or cloud driven with zero choice.
Microsoft didn't just "play hardball"; they abused a monopoly position to extinguish competition, and they lost multiple antitrust suits because of it. The fact that other companies are misbehaving now doesn't negate the damage MS did in the 1990s. OEMs couldn't refuse MS agreements because of MS's monopoly. To an extent the computing world has recovered, so if you weren't old enough or not yet into the computing industry you might not have noticed, but the market would be way more interesting without MS's anticompetitive bullying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Government...