Microsoft wasn't interested in killing Netscape per se. It wanted to fortify their dominant position. By making IE, which was integrated into Windows, the preferred browser, they did fortify their dominant position. That makes money. Not from IE alone, but form the whole package, which is what M$ really cares about anyway. The idea is to eliminate competition.
Sure, but Netscape wasn't committed to open web standards. They wanted to impose their own, so you should not necessarily be lamenting the fact that Microsoft eliminated them. ;-)
[ Interesting part of the story though is that MS had seats in the W3 consortium and my conspiracy theory (we all have our own re Microsoft eh?) is that they could have used their position to subvert the quality and usability of web standards.
For example, W3C DOM stinks and is a strong reason why we still don't have good web apps running on our browsers that can replace native GUI ones. The Mozilla project could be distracting themselves by trying to build a platform on what's essentially a lousy foundation created by a committee on which Microsoft once sat on and, iinm, has now left. (Meanwhile, Windows Forms arrives and blows them away...)
Interesting parallel with OpenGL... whose standards committee MS also joined and eventually left. Could this be their sneaky way of ensuring their own standards' ultimate victory? Use their clout to gain entry into a standards group and find a way to slow down or sabotage said standard's progress...? I haven't really read anything to confirm this theory, though. ]
Anyway, the question here is how ethical MS' move was to bundle IE along with Windows. I offer the following observations:
WRT the end user ================ The way IE was integrated with Windows slowed things down at the beginning, but eventually became unnoticeable. Today, it is actually welcome, especially by newbies, since they don't have to waste time installing a browser to access the Net. The fact that the non-IE browsers work so well under Windows (much better than IE in fact), also proves that bundling IE does not prevent the user from adopting better alternatives.
WRT developers ============== There are certain pros and cons with the way Microsoft did the integration. The cons seem to have disappeared as machines became more powerful and had memory to spare, making seemingly bad technical decision of the past look pretty astute (or irrelevant) today. (Although I myself used to loath the fact that IE's modules were automatically loaded in).
One of the pros is that you can easily access IE's rendering engine as an ActiveX control, build other browsers on top of it, and expect things to run smoothly with comparatively less work. In Linux-GNU's case, the Gecko engine is not a part of the OS, so it is not as convenient for developers to take advantage of. They cannot assume it will always be present and end up having to do additional stuff to manage this (labor which often propagates up to the end-user). The flipside is that if you choose to use something else, you will not be saddled with its presence (but is it really worth the trouble today?).
WRT their competition ===================== ...and this is where the argument against such bundling practices have real merit. But it is such a tricky thing to decide when a particular practice is anti-competitive and when it is justifiably being done to add value to one's product for the benefit of the consumer. This is clearly lawyer territory and I suspect context has a lot to do with it such that there are no black and white answers.
I'm not trying to cover up the fact that MS is no stranger to unsavoury business practices. But I have yet to be convinced that embrace and extend is one of them. What I can see right now is that:
1. Without embrace and extend, Microsoft might not even have survived! Look at Novell... which clung to IPX/SPX a bit too tightly and a bit too long. Wrong move.
As for the 'extend' part, you can't blame them for that. When businesses add value by innovating, they are fulfilling their proper role. What you should be happy with is the fact open source has changed the rules for introducing innovation. Today, even a company in such a dominant position as Microsoft realizes that they have to make some kind of concession to openness in order to succeed with new technology.
2. Emrace and extend kept the Internet from splintering. If Microsoft had tried to develop proprietary protocols instead of embracing open ones, life would be harder for techies everywhere.
From the vantage point of a Linux and Windows power user, the open protocols work quite well on both platforms, so I have no reason to bitch at MS for having 'embraced' in bad faith. Of course, the reason for this is that when it came to the 'Net, MS was not acting from a position of strength. Unix / open source made the rules and if MS hadn't complied properly, people would be more likely to opt for the alternative instead of them. Thus, a "replace, take over" strategy would have gravely hurt them (perhaps even mortally?) and to their credit, they were smart enough to realize that.
Realize that even with the embrace-extend strategy, they were not able to take over. They hope to do that instead with their modified strategy in .NET and are trying to bolster that by adopting the very tactics of their sworn enemy. Tenacious bunch, eh? Definitely not to be underestimated...
> Seems to work where I am. People can SEE the results of M$ inferior > code. As far as my experience goes, that does win converts, at least > in my small neck of the woods.
At this point in time, I no longer have gripes about the quality of M$ code. Now that Windoze has stopped crashing so often (for desktop use at least), Linux finds its main advantage gone and has yet to catch up in the area of usability and device support. My real complaints are that:
a. MS costs more
b. It is not free (as in free speech)
c. Except for a handful of inconsequential cases like WiX, their source is not open (neither viewable and modifiable)
d. I still don't like their APIs.
.NET's APIs are a big improvement over the old ones, but I am still far from completely happy with them. They still smell overengineered to me. Many Open Source alternatives can be found (libSDL, Python Standard Library, etc...) that are better designed and more dependable cross-platform wise. So much so that despite all the wonderful improvements in .NET compared to older MS technology, I still question the wisdom of committing it.
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