Journal Journal: Is it just me or has the average IQ.... 5
...of Slashdotters gone down? Or is it just a bunch of trolls?
It seems like any article discussing the unbundling of Internet Explorer from Windows seems to *repeatedly* contain versions of this comment:
"Why isn't Apple forced to unbundle Safari? Why isn't Canonical forced to unbundle FF from Ubuntu?" - well, neither Apple nor Canonical have been found guilty of breaking monopoly legislation with the bundling of browsers.
"How is the user going to get a browser if one isn't installed by default?" - Oh come on, it's not rocket science to supply a simple tool to allow the user to download and install one of the browsers available today! Any competent developer could knock up such a tool in an afternoon including a 2 hour coffee break. It's not like unbundling the browser means the TCP/IP stack has gone, too. In any case, hardly anyone actually installs Windows, most normal users have it preinstalled on a PC, and the OEM will ship some sort of browser. OEMs are already shipping things like Google Desktop, it's hardly a big leap to add Firefox or Chrome or whatever to the image.
The best comments by far are those of they type "if the European Union punishes Microsoft for breaking EU law, then Microsoft should retaliate by pulling out of the EU market". Firstly, that sort of action would result in the instant slaughter of the Microsoft board by the shareholders (the EU market for software is larger than the entire North American market), and secondly, it would immediately and clearly demonstrate how dangerous the MS monopoly is - and cause EU companies and states to switch to alternatives. This in turn would mean the widespread acceptance of the alternatives to Windows (which in the desktop market doesn't really exist at present), and therefore damage Microsoft's markets in the rest of the world - especially the market for MS Office if everyone in the EU stopped using it.