Xbox is probably the closest they've ever been to being genuinely competitive. Beyond that it's all monopoly or failure.

Office and Exchange are two fairly obvious examples.
The Slashdot anti-Microsoft crowd also forget that Internet Explorer, also, did actually beat Navigator by being a better browser. That's why its marketshare really exploded with IE4, in the six months before that was integrated into Windows 98 (and the year or so after that before Windows 98 displaced Windows 95).

How can it? They buy a PC it comes with Windows. It's already factored in and can't be factored out. Not without a significant amount of effort anyway. It's simpler and usually no more expensive to just pay the fucking Windows Tax, wipe, and reload with your OS of choice. MS still gets the sale in most cases even if you don't use their OS.

It is, and always has been, easy to buy a PC without Windows if you really want to. Most people simply don't want to. Get over it.

They tried.

And failed. That was my point.

This time around, Microsoft's doing it in stages, and making their own hardware, so that OEM participation isn't necessary. Same goal: they own the whole PC. Not the OEM. Not the consumer.

OEM participation is always going to be necessary. Microsoft don't have the size to address the entire x86 market, any more than Apple does.

Nobody is preventing MS from bundling anything as long as they don't abuse their monopolistic position in the market. There are many ways to remedy this or to avoid this in the first place - I suggest you read up on this if you are serious in participating in a debate related to antitrust and competition law.

I have. Or, rather, I did a decade ago when this was actually relevant.

BTW, a quick search on Google gives you plenty of references to the Winsock issues and also some history on how Winsock came to be. I take it that you know how to search on the a internet for information.

Certainly, but I have no way of knowing what "references" *you* are using.

Let me explain. Nobody advertises vegetables, so they are less popular. Everyone knows that vegetables are good for us, but we still by processed crap foods instead because they are easier to ship and keep for months and years. Veggies go bad quick

The mere fact your false dichotomy is between "vegetables" and "processed crap foods" says all it needs to.

I spent six of the last ten years as a Linux sysadmin and the three before that as a FreeBSD sysadmin. There's nothing you can tell me about Linux I don't already know.

Then there is Android with 68% of the portable device market. Surely THAT isn't any indication of how easy Linux can be. It is amazing what happens when there is marketing. Linux wins. It beats Apple and it trounces anything from Microsoft.

Thanks for supporting my point.

Surface is DOA. Sure, we will see it used in movies and TV shows and in millions of dollars of ads, but humans have learned - we don't **need** a proprietary product from Microsoft anymore. I look forward to when MS realizes they need to make compatible, open-format, OSes, and software products.

If you think anyone but a tiny minority (seriously tiny - as in fractions of one percent) give a flying fuck about "proprietary", or "compatible, open-format, OSes", you're in no position to make a comment about anything, because you're completely disconnected from reality.

The only thing that matters was whether the monopolist was hindering competition at the time by abusing its monopoly position.

It's funny that you mentioned Winsock. Back in the day Microsoft created a winsock library that detected and overwrote the proprietary winsock DLLs included with the software from the leading online service providers of the day (AOL and Compuserve) [...]

Source ?

[...] and, surprise surprise, conflicted with the software of those services. Many speculated this was to push Microsoft's new (at the time) online service - MSN

Except - before even contemplating how completely different those things were - winsock was Windows 3.xx era and MSN came in with Win95.

So for Winsock, yes, there was a definite point to answer regarding monopolistic practices when they started bundling it in Windows 95. It also killed Trumpet Winsock, but that was another matter entirely.

So you would argue Windows shouldn't have a TCP/IP stack today because it's anti-competitive ?

How far back do you want to go here ? Will you argue Windows shouldn't have Explorer because back in the day the whole GUI was a separate product ?

A large part of that was leveraging its OS and bundling it with different products in other markets (such as web browsers) and making it difficult, if not impossible to separate them (thinking back to the IE debacle).

Yet today the idea of not having an embedded browser component in your desktop OS is laughable.

Used to be your desktop OS didn't even come with a network stack. Was it monopoly abuse when Microsoft put one in Windows ?

It's MY hardware. Once I buy it it becomes MY personal property to use any way I see fit.

Knock yourself out then, no-one prevents you from doing so.

Zonda won't stop you taking one of their cars down to the beach. However, nor will they help you turn one of their cars into a dune buggy.

It's in the sentence you quote. Windows.

It's not illegal to have a monopoly in your own product. Hopefully I don't have to explain why.

They were convicted of abusing monopoly power in the OS/Browser/Office arena a while back, in case you might've missed that trial.

No, I didn't. Which is why I know what market they were actually found to be a monopoly in: x86-compatible PC OSes. Not office. Not browsers. Certainly not something as generic as "all operating systems"

Surely you agree Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market.

Which OS market ? There's more than one.

The reason this is an abuse is quite simple. They are requiring ARM based tablets that have Windows 8 certification (take whatever you want from the intended meaning of that phrase) to require a non-user accessible key to certify or "sign" binaries on the ARM platform. Granted, Surface is Microsoft's product, but this will (and it has been WELL documented) apply to ALL ARM processor based tablets, even from third parties. (Want to play in Windows 8 Land? You're going to have to pay the gatekeeper, Microsoft, and not give users the SecureBoot Keys.

So you're arguing there won't be any ARM based tablets on the market soon capable of running anything except Windows 8 ? To be clear, you're predicting the death of Android on ARM tablets ?

All you have to do is look at the history of Microsoft to see that anything they do is geared towards not making a better product than their competitors, but defeating utterly their competitors and leaving them unable to continue.

Actually it's a struggle to think of any significant Microsoft product that hasn't won out by being more attractive to customers than the alternatives.

The problem that Microsoft's been facing for decades now is the fact that Linux is free. You can't under-price free, and you can't, in the current Intel architecture, make a suitable "Windows only" system anymore. (There are exceptions, and some driver support sucks, but for the most part, it's not like it was in the heyday of Microsoft's OS hot war against everyone else.)

It is stupidly trivial for Microsoft to create a standard for "Windows only" systems. It is trivial today, it was trivial ten years ago, it was trivial ten years before that. They didn't.

Linux has been free forever. Strangely, it hasn't displaced Windows. It hasn't even displaced MacOS. Indeed, the result has been the complete opposite. Clearly "free" means diddly squat to customers.

So forgive us for not believing Microsoft doesn't have a sinister plot in mind with this secureBoot code signing fungasm of theirs. History has proven that they are not to be trusted.... ever.

The only thing missing from your paranoid rant is the ridiculous "DOS ain't done" line.

Actually people should complain, Microsoft is abusing it's OS monopoly [...]

In what market are you proposing Microsoft has a monopoly ?

Not loading their publisher key is a blatant attempt to try to prevent people from running other OSes on that piece of hardware which is an abuse of their "dominant market share" and they need to be punished for it, preferably harshly

"Dominant market share" ? In what market ? Not tablet hardware. Not tablet OSes. Not tablet software. What market ?

No, it doesn't. It still does not say anything about the actual performance of the opera. Why would such a statement reflect on the actors/singers?

Yes, it does. Because you are disagreeing with the judgement.
Unless you meant something other than "I think X is incompetent even though Y has judged him as competent" by "evidence" ?

Based on my experience. And they could convince me by doing it competently.

So nothing and nothing, then.

I am curious who you think should be legislating and enforcing laws if not "the state", however.

If Windows had improved as much since 1991 as Linux has [...]

It did, it just started in 1982.

You have the kind of intellectual integrity that makes used car salesmen look like volunteers at a homeless shelter.

Law enforcement considers having bottled water in your car evidence of drug use and can tag you with possession of drug paraphenilia or use it as an excuse to strip your car down to the axles looking for drugs, then leave you with a disassembled car on the side of the road. A teenager was recently arrested and charged with possession of an explosive device because he doodled a comic book character who could shoot beams of energy out of his fists -- unfortunately, he also had an interest in engineering and electronics and his house contained many things that had been disassembled. No explosive material was found. He's still looking at life in prison.

Links ?

I don't mind paying taxes but I make less than 100,000 dollars a year and pay more than 50,000 a year in taxes by the time the Feds, State and local governments get through bleeding me.

Please show your working.

I'm not blaming the technology for anything, nor am I "confused" about anything.

I am pointing out that the argument about having no problems left to solve because the hardware is so awesome no software could run badly on it is fallacious. Sticking a "that we would approve" qualifier in is irrelevant, since it would make the statement true at any time, so long as you didn't "approve" software that ran badly.

The solution to our problem is to wait for the guy to retire. Fortunately that's probably going to be within 12 months.