As the government wrote in a trial brief:
"In short, Microsoft feared and sought to impede the development of network effects that cross-platform technology like Netscape Navigator and Java might enjoy and use to challenge Microsoft's monopoly. Another internal Microsoft document indicates that the plan was not simply to blunt Java/browser cross-platform momentum, but to destroy the cross-platform threat entirely, with the 'Strategic Objective' described as to 'Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#...
This is the strategy an MS exec described as "embrace, extend, extinguish":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
The "embrace" part is particularly gross. IIRC, the court found that Microsoft deliberately misled developers to make them think that apps developed with MS-JVM would work cross-platform, when really it was designed to prevent that. They lied to developers to trick us into wasting our time, to destroy cross-platform technologies that threatened their monopoly.
Want to make it practical? There are thousands of us here who have each spent hundreds of hours struggling with IE compatibility when we could have been building cool stuff. We're building the future as fast as we can, but you and I and Bill Gates will all get to see less of that future before we die, because Microsoft set out to break the web and it took a whole lot of time to fix it.
Of course that was going on 20 years ago now. Microsoft probably has interns now who were born after IE came out. I realized recently that I'm not mad about this stuff anymore. But it's not a history we should forget or repeat.
This is the issue that pisses me off more than anything. There must be hundreds of man-years of development effort wasted on stupid things Microsoft did. Not because they didn't know better, that's forgivable, but they did to screw over the competition. It goes back to MS-DOS intentionally trying to screw over DR-DOS and continues up to now with document format standards.
Yes, it's become clear that a web browser should be bundled in the OS, and even as I said at the time, when I was a teenager, you need a shitty web browser to download a good one, or at least it's a big help.
What Microsoft did, and is admitted in a book, is to leverage the Windows monopoly to strengthen the Office monopoly, which had impact on every educational institution, law firm, local, state, and national legislature and locked up a ton of public domain work in a file format that only an expensive program that doesn't run on all computers can read.
Eventually that was steamrolled over by Congress demanding an open format, though interoperability is still pretty piss poor.
Of course, all of the DOJ's resources to show Microsoft who's boss were wasted on a silly fight over whether you can bundle a web browser. If you read Ben Horowitz' "The hard thing about hard things", it's not even the browser that sunk Netscape, it's IIS - their bread and butter was the server.
In light of the fact that our phones and televisions now ship with web browsers, and likely most of us are not paying for web servers, it seems clear that Netscape's business model was not going to last.
So yeah, fuck Microsoft.
Absolutely. I dislike tied sales, I dislike having to buy a Microsoft operating system with my hardware just as much as I dislike getting IE (or chrome or any other browser) forcefully rammed down my throat when I buy an operating system.
I'm pretty sure you can guess what browser I'm using to type this comment.
> It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included
Does it?
I see the browser as an application, not as part of the OS. And I feel that as a user of an operating system you should have a choice what browser you run and what browser gets installed on top of the OS after that has finished installing. All these cross-layer links are good for nothing.
Yes.
You say you want choice, but if you didn't have a browser how would you download the browser of your choice? Osmosis? Or, more importantly how would your average user download their browser?
Every OS since then (OSS or not) has shipped with a browser and has made it the default for any API rendering that needs to occur (e.g. Ubuntu, Android, OS X, Windows, iOS, Firefox OS, etc).
Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years.
> Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years.
You can't make statements like that. This is the reality we live in, there is no undo/redo/replay so we only have data about this reality. What would or could have happened if things had not gone the way they did is immaterial, for all you know we'd have moved faster rather than slower. We just do not know. What we do know is that Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior, and that they continued this for quite a while after they were already convicted using their lobbying power to get-out-of-jail free.
People were downloading files long before browsers were commonplace.
And all three heavyweight gorilla IT companies could support FF/Opera with a clean conscience by donating (just like google does already, points for them).
When I ask them "can you imagine any OS delivered today without that bundled in?" they change the subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft
Yes, there are people that probably would have preferred Peter Tattam's company to be bought by MS. (It was shareware, see thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875). But it definitely wasn't an obligation.
Very few would argue that an OS has to have a browser to be functional. Just like very few would argue that all networking should be done in a user space process not part of the operating system.
This whole argument is kind of silly anyways since it's leaving out intent, which is a very important contextual part of evaluating the action of a person or entity. Seeing emails showing MS trying to deliberately get web developers hooked on a "more standards-compliant" IE and then locking those same devs in is a much different thing than MS honestly wanting people to have a decent default software base to go with Windows, even if both strategies end up in practice with "IE 4 preinstalled".
But there (still!) are plenty of people who start with an empty distro and gradually build up, and installing a browser happens just like any other package installation: through the package manager.
It was a nightmare of coupling, and it's one of the reasons that IE was so hard to get rid of in the enterprise.
This is exactly how Windows is sold through OEMs, and like Windows, the effect is that the consumer gets the software "for free" (since it is included in the total price of the computer). So: Netscape and IE would have both come with every new computer.
Microsoft told OEMs that, in effect, they could not buy Windows if they intended to install Netscape on it. That is illegal tying, and is what killed Netscape, as it cut off a major potential source of new revenue.
Microsoft was the first to release a free browser included with the OS. That killed Netscape's business of selling browsers on a CD for $40, and Netscape was understandably upset.
It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included, at least so you can read documentation and download the browser of your choice.