[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“A challenge to our software industry pipe-dream.“
“There has been a lot of hullabaloo about Judge Jackson’s
initial Finding of Fact in the Microsoft vs. US Department of
Justice case. Unfortunately, most of the commentary, as well as the
fact-finding itself, have largely missed the point. Quite a few
commentators have lamented Judge Jackson’s finding that Linux,
BeOS, etc. are not in the same league as Windows. The following
should make it clear why that statement is perfectly true….”
“Consider some other software types where similar things have
NOT happened. Though the knee-jerk reaction is to label Microsoft
Office as a monopoly on office software, that is a flawed
conclusion. Corel, Sun (viz StarDivision), Lotus, and possibly
others offer applications or suites of applications that provide
very similar sets of functionality to that which Microsoft offers.
They can even read and write each other’s files (to a certain
extent). The advantages Microsoft’s software has are 1) ability to
more or less force OEM’s to distribute their software, 2) knowledge
of undocumented features of the Win32 API’s, and 3) the perception
of customers that, naturally, Microsoft’s applications will work
best on Microsoft’s platform….”