Mike McCarty wrote:
Jeff Vian wrote:
On Sun, 2006-02-12 at 00:03 -0600, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
[snip]
It is a Microsoft problem as we see stated in the article, "Linux
evangelist John H. Terpstra told me: "Microsoft has used its market
dominance to coerce OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and
resellers not to sell competing products and services."
co.erce - v co.erced, co.erc.ing v.t. 1 To constrain by force,
law, authority, or fear; compel 2 To bring into subjection or
under control by superior force; repress 3 To bring about by
coercion: to /coerce/ obedience - v.i. 4 To use coercive
measures, as in government. See synonyms under COMPEL.
Please state what, exactly, is this "coerce" that MicroSoft has
done.
While all hardware vendors have the right to chose what/what not to
release in the areas of drivers and hardware, it is very difficult to
get an even playing field when the big boy uses coercion to tell the
vendor that if he does not play by the big boy's rules he will lose out.
This stinks of the old mob tactics of the protection racket.
Oh, so MicroSoft has done such a good job of porting its software
to many different hardware platforms, that it is difficult for
others to do as well? MicroSoft has risked so much capital
in purchasing the documentation on how to use some proprietary
hardware that others who are unwilling to do so have a problem
competing?
Is this what is meant by "coerce"?
Mike
You're overlooking another thing that Microsoft does: it demands the
/exclusive/ right to place its OS on a computer vendor's machine. It's
either all-or-nothing with them.
And if you /don't want/ MS Windows, you're still stuck with paying for
it. Years ago someone started a movement to try to "return" the
pre-installed OS. MS got wise to that and amended their EULA so that
such returns were essentially at the discretion of the vendor--and then
the vendors refused to honor returns of the OS. And these days, Dell
ships computers /without/ any MS installation disks, so that there's
nothing physical to return! (That, and you couldn't load Windows on a
second machine even if in some fit of multimedia mania you wanted to.)
Result: Microsoft sells license after license for its OS, that many
people will never use. No updates, either. Now where do I, as an
organizer of corporations and LLC's, go to set up a business model
whereby I might actually induce people to pay for /nothing at all/?
The only cure for this is going to be for someone to make widely
available the names of the original manufacturers of laptop computers
that get a Dell or HP label slapped on them, so that we Linux users can
go /directly to them/ to buy our machines, and /not a penny/ (or a
centime, or a pfennig, or a drachma, or a kopeck, or a yen, or whatever)
will go to Microsoft for software and updates that we will not use.
Temlakos
