On 12/6/05, Andrew Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The website one is, I agree, difficult even to imagine, let alone to > prove. > As for the other crimes, they are, as you say, anti-trust violations. They > were crimes, that should have been punished. But they are not the methods > of organised crime, which involve violence, usually or often against > family > members as well as the perpetrator.
I believe the one method the original exaggerator was referring to was extortion. The phrase "Nice website, shame if something would happen to it" refers to the criminal activity known as "Protection Money". Where a bully would come in, make vague threats in a backhanded way, and offer to protect the victim for a fee. This is not, however, anything close to what MS did. What MS did with IE that was unethical, (not, however illegal), was to make IE not work properly with standardized HTML. So websites would have to be written differently to work with IE. This, in turn, would make the website appear messed up, (as they actually were) on other standards-based browsers, like Netscape. This is where the 'This page best viewed in Internet Explorer" comes into play. Also, with MS's proprietary IE-only ActiveX software, web designers could do things they couldn't before, unless they used Java. Java, was and still is for the most part, proprietary as well. It just isn't limited to IE or Windows. And it's a better system altogether. But since MS was bundling IE with Windows, and ActiveX with IE - there was no need for the user to download or install anything for the ActiveX websites to work. So you need up with websites that only work, or at least only work well, in Windows' Internet Explorer with ActiveX - that's three layers of control for Microsoft. Microsoft never threatened to do any harm to any one's website. They just built a broken browser, that many web designers wanted to work with, because it was so widespread. Comparing the creation of IE to a Mafia member threatening a local businessman is a large exaggeration. -- - Chad Smith http://www.gimpshop.net/ Because everyone loves free software!
