Posted on 01/17/2009 3:46:50 AM PST by reaganaut1
BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union said Friday that Microsoft’s practice of selling the Internet Explorer browser together with its Windows operating system violated the union’s antitrust rules.
It ordered the software giant to untie the browser from its operating system in the 27-nation union, enabling makers of rival browsers to compete fairly.
“Microsoft’s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between Web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice,” the E.U. said in a statement.
It gave Microsoft eight weeks to respond, adding that the company could defend its position in a hearing if it found that useful.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Microsoft may not be perfect, but it works for me far more hours a day than any of my Congressmen, and is a lot cheaper, too.
Microsoft should simply do as the EU demands, but then CHARGE every stinking European person TRIPLE the price to download and install Internet Explorer....
...especially after the EU geeks come to realize how indepsensible Microsoft and Internet Explorer really are in the world of computers.
Apple hardly has clean hands.
Ever heard of Xerox?
Excel and Word cost money and always have. Word Perfect and Lotus 123 failed to compete.
Hardly the same thing as Netscape trying to compete with free. Microsoft did kill Netscape.
So is the EU going to demand that Apple not ship Safari with OSX?
Good question :-)
“Careful, you’re not allowed to say anything negative about Apple or anything positive about Microsoft on this board.”
News to me. Ive been here more than 10 years.
This silly attack by the EU has been going on for so long that it’s now completely irrelevant.
There are dozens of free browsers, so to speak of “innovation,” “competition,” and “choice” is preposterous.
You want a replacement for IE? Go to the Internet and download it in one minute, and another one minute to install it.
This is what happens when you have a bureaucracy that’s stuck on stupid.
And while I’m at it, is the EU going to demand that Linix not be free? It is a full OS which is drastically more substantial than just some Internet browser...
After all it is pretty hard to compete with free, just ask Netscape.
I wrote my own Notepad program. It’s unfair that Microsoft includes Notepad with Windows because it does not allow me to compete fairly with Microsoft’s Notepad, so they should take Notepad out of Windows.
Oops... Make that Linux...
thank you.
“I made this post made using a Puppy Linux live cd...”
- - -
Good for you, but your link does not work.
I thought if you deleted IE from Windows you’d have major problems with updating?
All my Linux installations have at least 4 or 5 different browsers installed, for the same reasons. I try out different browsers on Windows and Linux boxes and use the ones I like and ignore the rest.
Or is that too simple-minded for some folks?
;^)
The EU and others even in our own USA, mostly Libs, have an agenda to destroy the free market system. Chipping away a little piece at a time. Remember the days before MS? Commodore, IBM, Tandy, Curtis Sinclair and more. No standards and one system to the next could not communicate or even share files with each other. Like it or not MS (with Apple technology) came up with windows and made it possible to get where we are now on a global level. And as has already been mentioned, Firefox and Google Chrome can easily be downloaded and used instead. I use them all depending on what I want to do or where I want to go on the web.
I think I’ll go download the new IE8 beta and give it a spin on Al Gore’s internet thingy! :-)
Really? Exactly what "technology" did Microsoft "steal" from Apple?
As far as I understand it, Microsoft decided that the GUI interface (which Apple had... ahem, appropriated from Xerox, was the way of the future. Kudos to both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates for their development of the GUI. Jobs was pissed off that he exposed his next product to Gates and Gates immediatly persued it as well. That said, it's a HELL of a long way from "stealing technology". Both men had the foresight to develop Xerox's technology. I get annoyed when the Apple fans repeat this canard. If you can show me the code that Microsoft copied from Apple to figure out how to do something, you would have a case. As it is they both persued the same idea. If anyone is an injured party here, it is Xerox.
Not even close. If you remove Safari from OSX, the OS still works. If you take IE out of Windows, the cracks appear.
Gee, maybe the same way everybody did it for years, by using FTP?
It's what the browsers use internally for downloads, anyway.
And who says there can't be a browser there?
The point is to have browsers that aren't so tied into the OS that others can't compete, not to have no browsers.
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