That's short sighted. Please define the "foreseeable future" because from my experience that's just a cliche that gets thrown around far too much. Here's something that is more concrete: given enough time and not enough competition one company will dominate the market. Just because it isn't so now doesn't mean it won't be later. The best way to prevent market dominance is to welcome all competition with open arms and put aside any emotional feelings about which companies are "nice" and which ones are "naughty".

Microsoft's failure in the mobile market hurting it's desktop market is, in my opinion, not even worth discussing. First of all we could use a reasonable desktop alternative to Windows that is not locked into a hardware platform. Second, Windows is alive and well in industries where people can't afford to make decisions based on image. I'm not talking about run or the mill consumers that tune into the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials I'm talking about industry. The vast majority or our refining, chemical, electrical generation, pulp and paper, nuclear, pharmaceutical, smart grid, manufacturing, you name it runs Windows (at least on the desktop). Furthermore, in those industries you pick a platform and you stick with it for as long as you can milk it. They could care less about what Microsoft's mobile or gaming platforms are doing. Not everyone is easily swayed by reputation and image. Some people still make decisions based on good old fashioned dollars and cents.

I don't want them to dominate the mobile platform (which at this point is only a very remote possibility anyway). I don't want anyone to dominate the mobile platform. The only way to do that is to embrace all competition. Companies are all the same they're after your money. But as long as they have to watch their back and fight off the competition they'll at least be giving you something worth while for it.

Comments like this make me nervous because they insinuate that other companies (such as Google, Apple) will not behave the same way Microsoft did if they have a chance to. And any argument to that effect is terribly weak given that there is absolutely no evidence to support it. Public corporations are public corporations. They are not on your side. Your welfare is not their primary concern unless it boosts their profits. I'm not necessarily against public corporations. They're like fire. They can help you when you need them but given the right circumstances they will burn indiscriminately.

ANY competition in a "free market" economy is good. It doesn't matter where it comes from. There is plenty of evidence to support that. Windows 7 is by far the best operating system Microsoft ever produced and the only reason why is competition. We need competition from Microsoft to lower the chance that companies like Google, Apple, Adobe, or some other company try to pull a Microsoft stunt. And if you believe they won't you're terribly naive.

As a community of geeks we must put our emotions aside and assess these companies and their doings dispassionately.

Amen brother!
But seriously. You're absolutely right. I won't even make any arguments here I will simply refer everyone to Richard Dawkins wonderful book on the subject "The God Delusion". I especially like his Darwinian explanation of why religion is so successful within our species. The next step in human evolution is realizing that there is no god and being OK with that. Really, we don't need him/her.

What's wrong with learning from past experiences and doing whatever we can to nip this in the bud? I'm assuming you believe being proactive about something is being better than reactive.

What exactly is YOUR point? Should we all just roll over and accept the things we don't like in life? Maybe for some people the issue is big enough that they want to change the status quo. How can you make a claim that no one cares? Where's the evidence? Obviously the DoJ and the FTC cares. That's somebody backed by alot of guns. If you don't care then tune them out but really who gives a damn whether you think it's worthwhile to complain about it or not especially on a site where half the content could be construed as people whining about stuff. And if you think /. is a dev exclusive community then you MUST be new here.

Historically those who have tried failed. Perhaps because those who try to control free speech are doomed to fail? More likely because no amount of Apple technology can dominate the male biological imperative. This is either a big mistake on their part or they'll be eating their words soon.

I swear to God I'm going to pistol whip the next guy who says "Shenanigans".

Microsoft Security Essentials is free and it about as good a virus protection software gets.

While it's true that the task manager on Server 2008, 2008 R2, Vista, and Windows 7 is much better than what you get on Server 2003 and XP, Process Explorer just goes above and beyond.

Double click on a process and you can see.

1. TCP and UDP connections that the process has open.

2. If the process is svchost.exe it will show you every service hosted by the process so you can track it back to what is listed in services.msc.

3. It will show you each individual thread that belongs to the process.

4. If you have Debugging Tools for Windows and the right symbols you can even see the stack trace of each individual process thread.

5. Allows you to suspend any process.

6. You can see every open handle associated with the process.

7. Using the cross-hair tool you can track any window back to it's process ID.

8. You can see every environment variable that applies to the process.

9. All app domains and .Net performance objects that apply to the process.

10. More things I'm sure that I'm not aware of.

It's the ultimate windows process information tool. Fuck the Task Manager and fuck Cygwin they got nothing on Process Explorer and Process Monitor. Add WinDbg to the mix and a copy of Windows Internals and I'm pretty sure you have everything you need to resolve any issue that doesn't require having access to actual source code.