You are not even remotely close. All the Internet has to offer is content. Content is the stuff that is in your browser! Your logic or reading skills are greatly flawed - I never assumed or implied anything nor did I suggest everybody uses MS to created content - DON'T BE SILLY!
You see, it's an historical thing. Microsoft for sure tried and succeeded in controling the software market by creating proprietary file formats.
Nonsense. Complete nonsense. Microsoft did not invent proprietary file formats and nearly all desktop software uses them.
They could have adopted an open format or a preexisting format for Word, Excel etc. but they did not.
None of the other word processors or spreadsheet of the time used "open formats". Word Perfect dominated the market for a long time and they too had proprietary file formats. Lotus 1-2-3 dominated the market and they too had proprietary file format. You really don't know what you are talking about - both Word and Excel read and write other file formats.
Sorry I've been absent from this lively discussion.
I never claimed Word didn't read or write other formats. I'm arguing that the MS goal was to prevent others from reading their files, not the other way around. But, they didn't publish the specs for the file formats so they weren't really standards. Competitors had to reverse-engineer them. Of course, the competitors didn't publish the specs either. My point was that that was the old business model and it's breaking down.
I also never claimed that WordPerfect or other competitors didn't have the same business model of having a file format war. I thought what I was saying was well understood and accepted by most of us old enough to remember the history.
You remember the history, I know, because in another post you stated: Content is not encoded in their proprietary format. That was the desktop model and that is so "ten years ago".
But all this was said better in post 51 by beef and in post 103 by general_re.
I think the Internet screwed over that business model. The Internet is based on published standards that MS didn't control. Their attempt to control it failed. IE was a part of that attempt. Even if MS owned the standards, they would be in trouble because true standards have to have published specs. Very foreign to MS and other old-line companies.
You also said elsewhere: If somebody makes a browser that can deliver the same content IE can deliver - Microsoft does not care. They sell the tools to create and deliver content, not the browser.
So explain why Adobe gives Acrobat Reader away for free but charges for the full version of Acrobat, used to make content? I think it's because they have been able to pull off the business model in this small niche that MS wanted to pull off for the whole Internet.
Content is king - Microsoft knows this. The browser is merely a delivery device for content. People pay for content, not the browser.
Except for my online newspaper, I don't pay for content usually. Most of the content is free. So if MS makes money on tools to create content, and if those tools are based on published standards, do they have a competitive advantage over anyone else? Do they have a better Acrobat, a better Dreamweaver? No, what they have, I think, but I'm no expert, is a set of technologies unique to them, like Active Server Pages and other things that only run on Windows Server 200x.
My ISP has been running MS server technologies from the beginning. Recently, the MS license fees have sky-rocketed and are are killing them but they can't change now to PHP and MySQL or some competing commercial products because all of their customer web sites are based on MS Server technologies only.
Sounds to me as if the more things change the more they stay the same. But I was only trying to explain what I thought others were saying and I, obviously, haven't done a better job then anyone else here.