[Jerrek]

Originally Posted by towny

There is no doubt that Microsoft Windows with a media player included is a better product than Windows without one.

There you go. Then, if the EU prohibits Microsoft from shipping Media Player with Windows, they are prohibiting Microsft from improving their product. So my original statement stands. You're advocating competition, yet you're preventing a company from improving its product. Yet you're not doing it to other companies, such as Apple with QuickTime.

The reason I keep using phrases like 'short-sighted' and 'narrow-minded' is because whether it's a 'better' product in the here and now is only one concern. In the long term, allowing Microsoft to dominate to the extent that there is no competition leaves one single organisation providing all services without any effective challenge from anywhere. Doesn't sound that different than communism to me.

So, unless the government helps out, Apple and Linux will disappear off the market? Are they so bad that they need special rules and regulations to make it?

I for one don't think so.

I don't claim ownership of them except in the way I am entitled, as a voter in a democratic society, to have a say in how things are done here. You have the same privilege - if you dislike the anti-trust laws that blight Microsoft in the States in a not dissimilar way to our European Competition Commission, it's your right to go and vote for someone pledged to repeal them. Is there any mainstream opposition to the current antu-trust laws in the USA?

So, if the majority votes that everyone worth more than $100,000 should give all their wealth to the government for redistribution then it is justified because it is what the majority decides?

You cannot vote someone's rights away. Your excuse to the blatant infringement on Microsoft's rights is basically "because the majority says so."

That is not an acceptable reason. That is a weak excuse for an anti-competitive action taken by people that have no rights, but still deam they should have, over another individual or company.

Apple has got away with things that would have put Microsoft in the dock a dozen times over. On the one hand it's deeply hypocritical, but having said that, Apple doesn't have the same power to destroy an industry simply by deciding to do things in a certain way.

Microsoft doesn't have the power to destroy anything. Everyone can just pick Linux or Apple, or write their own operating system. Nothing is preventing it!

You're hypocritical in the fact that you want to restrict Microsoft from improving its products, but Apple should have free reign. That is just not cool.

Linux is an operating system kernel, normally suurounded by GNU tools, even though the GNU project has long been developing a kernel of its own. Then you can choose from a range of GUIs to sit on top of it all. So anyone who uses Linux has already enjoyed far more free choice than they would be permitted by Microsoft.

I still want to buy RedHat with NTFS. My choice of file systems is restricted and infringed on because I'm FORCED by a company to use a file system I don't want.

Let us get real. That is stupid. YET, that is exactly what you're doing to Microsoft.

However this is a bogus comparison because 1/ Linux is essentially free, and it is open source, and therefore incapable of monopolizing the market even if it were the dominant operating system; and 2/ like Apple, it isn't in a monopoly position.

There is no monopoly position in the operating system market.
Second, if Microsoft manages to maintain 90% of the market by charging $250 for an operating system when people can get a free one (Linux), their product must be substantially better. Remember how people moaned and complained about IE being free and Netscape not? Well, if Netscape was so much better, people would have kept paying for it. But they didn't, because Microsoft gave it away for free, and it was better. That forced Netscape to do the same. Free enterprise 101.

That said, it is not a bogus comparison. I want to buy Redhat Linux with NTFS, and they are forcing me to use ext3. They should be barred from such anti-competitive practices!

Please, the quoted source is a 'senior writer at the Ayn Rand institute'. I see nothing to convince me that they don't believe the same thing. Don't split hairs.

And as a senior clergy man, the Pope is the alpha and the omega of Christianity.