[dreyfus]

DonBurnett said:

Does Apple provide any other browsers as an "OEM" with it's hardware any more? YES or NO?

No and they do not have to...

1. They have no monopoly ? actually they have less than 4% global market share
2. They did not invest millions to make a free product (IE6 at that time), just to damage a commercial competitor (Netscape) and did not blackmail OEMs and resellers
3. They observe standards

[DonBurnett]

Okay let me put it another way..

I would pose a question to all the Apple Centrists here (yes I own a Mac and PC, in fact more than a few of each for very different reasons, in case anyone is interested..
Let's put this in terms of something Apple People understand..
Let's say one day the Rhapsody Music Service in "Europe" said to the EU, we want to complain.. Apple has a dominant share with it's iPods in the music market and they control consumer choice of which music service they should use and buy from..
We want them to include Rhapsody's Music Store in with and let it work with the iPOD instead of Apple's own iTunes Music store, because they indeed own dominant market share in hardware and software.. We don't just want to be "in the iTunes Store" we want to be bundled instead oh and by the way Apple needs to give us all their technical data on the iPod and start selling Rhapsody bundled in with their iPods..
How fair would that be?
It's the same situation different company.. Would that be really fair to Apple? If I were Apple I'd say NO.. How would that be any different than a web browser..
Then the EU comes back saying "OH We Understand, yeah that's really not fair, we still like itunes, how about letting the user select it through the store they buy it from which music service they want to be using.."
This would be no different how would you resolve this dispute. If the EU then told Apple well because of your dominant marketshare you have no choice.. Then Apple withdrew the product and the EU said wait you can't do that..
Do you guys see the issue, if you take the Microsoft bias out of the equasion??

[Martian]

Mercedes builds its own automatic transmissions. (Maybe that?s why they don?t offer manual shift in their performance models like other manufacturers including BMW do).

I think General Motors should sue ? or whatever the European Commission calls it ? to allow Mercedes buyers to ?ballot? for their choice of transmissions.

[DonBurnett]

1) Apple has a monopoly with the iPod and does the same thing keeping others out of their MP3 hardware and software. They totally dominate that market.

2) I don't still today see how Netscape was damaged AOL owns them today and spun off the Mozilla foundation for lots of $$$.. Apple has always given away a free web browser bundled with their OS. How did that not hurt netscape too..

3) Question: if your browser has 80% of the marketshare doesn't that make it's HTML the market standard? Never really understood how people could say that IE 6 didn't follow standards during it's day even though they were the major browser during the time on both the Mac and the PC..

Sounds like more anti-Microsoft rhetoric today. Couldn't we be talking about something more important LIKE HTML 5 and getting all browser makers (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Netscape, etc.)..

You don't hear Google complaining that Microsoft stifled the bringing out a competitive browser, and I don't hear Apple complaining about that with Safari either. These companies choose to battle based on innovation, not legalities and distribution. Why they know they will be successful anyway and it doesn't fly with me that they think they can't successfully compete..

[maccam]

What in the world does this have to do with browsers? Buying and playing music is an elective (hobby) activity, and iTunes has never in its history cripple your ability to use the internet. However, using a browser is becoming essential for banking, bill paying and shopping.

I smell troll.

[Grapho]

DonBurnett said:

1) Apple has a monopoly with the iPod and does the same thing keeping others out of their MP3 hardware and software. They totally dominate that market.

What? I can buy music from Amazon and use it with my iPod. The thing you don't quite understand is that having a monopoly is not illegal, abusing your monopoly is, that is why every year the EU gets on MS or Intel, or any other offender.

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2) I don't still today see how Netscape was damaged AOL owns them today and spun off the Mozilla foundation for lots of $$$.. Apple has always given away a free web browser bundled with their OS. How did that not hurt netscape too..

Sure, all this happened after EI was made free. Where you in elementary school back then? They even coerced Apple in to bundeling it back in the day.

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3) Question: if your browser has 80% of the marketshare doesn't that make it's HTML the market standard? Never really understood how people could say that IE 6 didn't follow standards during it's day even though they were the major browser during the time on both the Mac and the PC..

A standar has to be agreed upon by several pertinent parties, not just the abusive monopolistic one.

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Sounds like more anti-Microsoft rhetoric today. Couldn't we be talking about something more important LIKE HTML 5 and getting all browser makers (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Netscape, etc.)..

You don't hear Google complaining that Microsoft stifled the bringing out a competitive browser, and I don't hear Apple complaining about that with Safari either. These companies choose to battle based on innovation, not legalities and distribution. Why they know they will be successful anyway and it doesn't fly with me that they think they can't successfully compete..

Both your examples came after browser could no longer be monetized. Once MS set the free standar, nobody has been able to successfully sell a browser. So you go figure. Apple came out with Safari, precisely to take control of this from Microsoft and I believe Google probably had a similar incentive.

[dreyfus]

DonBurnett said:

1) Apple has a monopoly with the iPod and does the same thing keeping others out of their MP3 hardware and software. They totally dominate that market.

Wrong. They do not have a monopoly with MP3 players, actually they are not even the market leader in all European countries. In quite some the is not even an iTunes store. They have strong and healthy competitors, subscription services as well as other buy-to-own shops like Amazon, European telcos etc. No monopoly at all. You can use the tracks bought from iTunes on any competing player and you can add DRM-free tracks bought from other shops to iTunes.

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2) I don't still today see how Netscape was damaged AOL owns them today and spun off the Mozilla foundation for lots of $$$.. Apple has always given away a free web browser bundled with their OS. How did that not hurt netscape too..

Netscape was ruined by MS. Period. They sold the Netscape browser and their Internet server. MS gave away IE6 and a Web server for free with an OS having over 90% market share. Again, Apple never had a monopoly on the desktop, so they were allowed to bundle whatever they like.

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3) Question: if your browser has 80% of the marketshare doesn't that make it's HTML the market standard? Never really understood how people could say that IE 6 didn't follow standards during it's day even though they were the major browser during the time on both the Mac and the PC..

If 80% of cars drive around with inoperative brakes, make that legal? The HTML standards are developed and published by the W3C. MS was participating in almost all these committees, the decision to violate standards were deliberate and solely intended to lock in private and corporate users.

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You don't hear Google complaining that Microsoft stifled the bringing out a competitive browser, and I don't hear Apple complaining about that with Safari either. These companies choose to battle based on innovation, not legalities and distribution. Why they know they will be successful anyway and it doesn't fly with me that they think they can't successfully compete..

Actually, Google joined the complaint happily. The only valid complaint here is that the EU did originally focus too much on that useless Media Player and completely ignored the even bigger impact of the browser issue (but the DoJ made the same mistake).

[Frost7]

Wow, IE-using Microsoft enthusiasts are going to boycott Opera.
I predict this will be extremely effective.

[zarmanto]

Frost7 said:

I predict this will be extremely effective.

My thoughts exactly. Clearly these guys didn't bother to think very much about the potential consequences of their actions. See, there's this odd little paradoxical phenomena called "The Streisand Effect" -- and in fact, it's usually the most effective when those who set it off have overestimated their own popularity...

[DonBurnett]

Question One: the iPod.. Creative Labs had the first Mp3 players on the market and their marketshare isn't at all what Apple's is in any market today and their units would work with many other people's software.. Most other MP3 players work like USB memory sticks today and in the past.. they are seen as a drive letter and you can put anyone's stuff on them you want..

Question Two: Sure, all this happened after EI was made free. Where you in elementary school back then? They even coerced Apple in to bundeling it back in the day.

I am 41 years old I have been doing web development comercially since 1996. My first web browser was Mosaic (around 1995-96). Which was owned by a college, not Netscape. I also remember that lawsuit... Perhaps you don't.. The was I remember Apple needed money at the time and Microsoft gave them it to keep them alive by making a bundling deal.. I don't see Apple rushing to put Google Chrome in with their OS even though they have what seems to be a very deep relationship with Apple.. Why is that...

Note to other responder: The W3C wasn't formed until around 1994.. It didn't pick up momentum as a governing body till well after this whole thing happened. Microsoft has moved away from IE 6 HTML (which was before XHTML etc) and in IE 7 and IE 8 they do follow existing HTML 4.x standards fairly well, even offering meta-tags for versioning to retain backwards compatibility if needed).

Their own history records their timeline like this..
1995: Graphics, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Style1996: Math, Extensible Markup Language (XML)1997: Document Object Model (DOM), Patent Policy, Privacy, Synchronized Multimedia, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)1998: Internationalization1999: Voice Browser2000: URI2001: Device Independence, Semantic Web, XML Key Management, Quality Assurance2002: Multimodal Interaction, Web Services2003: XForms2004: Compound Document Formats
By the way Netscape Navigator was a free download on the internet by gopher or HTTP: if you required a CD it was $20-25 and was underwritten through advertising and given away by companies like AOL on their CDs..

By your own words "Once MS set the free standar, nobody has been able to successfully sell a browser." Microsoft rightly so didn't see the browser as a separate program, but as a component because on most Unix workstations (not macs) HTTP was just another protocol like GOPHER: FTP: etc and a window into that protocol that should be part of the OS not a separate component.

For the gentleman that indicated that Microsoft somehow had dominant marketshare on web servers, that's not true anyway.. If you look it up even Wikipedia will tell you that Netscape's web server is still sold today as the Sun Java Web Server. Sun bought it from Netscape, and it still has a very respectable market. Microsoft never made it to #1 with their web servers.. It was open sourced in 2009 under BSD license by Sun.. (which is now part of Oracle no doubt)..

[vfx2k4]

Is there an actual Microsoft enthusiast group out there? Do they wear BSOD t-shirts?

[Frost7]

vfx2k4 said:

Is there an actual Microsoft enthusiast group out there? Do they wear BSOD t-shirts?

Yeah, they wear blue T-shirts with a breast pocket. The breast pocket has the Xbox RROD on it, and the back has the BSOD text on it.

[doglesby]

DonBurnett said:

1) Apple has a monopoly with the iPod and does the same thing keeping others out of their MP3 hardware and software. They totally dominate that market.

Total bunk. iPods play AAC, MP3, H.264, and MPEG-4 files (and others) from anywhere.

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3) Question: if your browser has 80% of the marketshare doesn't that make it's HTML the market standard? Never really understood how people could say that IE 6 didn't follow standards during it's day even though they were the major browser during the time on both the Mac and the PC..

How can a self-proclaimed web developer not get this? You have a standard with a notion of well-formedness. Most browsers would return an error with badly formated HTML. Not MS! They would accept (and create in their other apps) badly formed HTML. That left all the other vendors to play the How The Hell Does IE Interpret This Craptastic Web Page game. Instead of advancing new capabilities, browser developers spent all their time reverse engineering what IE did. Then they tried to take over Java, created the security hole that is Direct X, etc. As the standards evolved (including explicit error-handling), MS dragged its feet adding support. All the while leaving users stuck in tab-less, featureless browser hell.

[dreyfus]

DonBurnett said:

Question One: the iPod.. Creative Labs had the first Mp3 players on the market and their marketshare isn't at all what Apple's is in any market today and their units would work with many other people's software.. Most other MP3 players work like USB memory sticks today and in the past.. they are seen as a drive letter and you can put anyone's stuff on them you want..

... and the point is? This is called competition. People preferred Apple's product. Apple did not subsidize it and damaged the competition by unfair practises. They did not blackmail distributors and resellers to remove alternative products or paid incentives for doing so. If you prefer a drive letter and drag and drop anachronisms, that is fine. The majority of people figured iTunes is better. Even under Windows.

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I am 41 years old I have been doing web development comercially since 1996. My first web browser was Mosaic (around 1995-96). Which was owned by a college, not Netscape. I also remember that lawsuit... Perhaps you don't.. The was I remember Apple needed money at the time and Microsoft gave them it to keep them alive by making a bundling deal.. I don't see Apple rushing to put Google Chrome in with their OS even though they have what seems to be a very deep relationship with Apple.. Why is that...

Actually, MS did buy Apple shares, which is a bit different from "giving them money". If Apple would bundle only one browser from a third party, that would be much more of a legal issue in some places of the world than only bundling the own browser. Again, Apple does not have a monopoly in any segment and they can legally bundle their own browser.

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Note to other responder: The W3C wasn't formed until around 1994.. It didn't pick up momentum as a governing body till well after this whole thing happened.

Not quite true. MS started to gain market share and lock in users with the release of IE4 (October 1997).

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By the way Netscape Navigator was a free download on the internet by gopher or HTTP: if you required a CD it was $20-25 and was underwritten through advertising and given away by companies like AOL on their CDs..

Well, actually the Netscape publishing suite was 80 USD, the Communicator Deluxe edition was 70 USD and the Internet Access Edition was around 50 USD. The Communicator Pro Edition was around 30 USD. The prices you mention were established in early 1998 when the damage was already done.

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For the gentleman that indicated that Microsoft somehow had dominant marketshare on web servers, that's not true anyway.. If you look it up even Wikipedia will tell you that Netscape's web server is still sold today as the Sun Java Web Server. Sun bought it from Netscape, and it still has a very respectable market. Microsoft never made it to #1 with their web servers.. It was open sourced in 2009 under BSD license by Sun.. (which is now part of Oracle no doubt)..

Of course IIS never made it to the top spot, as most hosting companies would not even run Windows (running multiple Web sites on one server was almost impossible before Windows 2000). The licensing cost of hosting Windows servers was prohibitive at that time, and they did not offer relevant special conditions for hosting versions before 2003. Apache took the top spot almost immediately because it was free and resource friendly. nginx was the second player at that time and also free and even more resource friendly. The free IIS mainly took the place in corporations, removing the Netscape servers there and eliminating this source of revenue too. Btw, you can see the "respectable market" of the Sun Web server here: http://news.netcraft...9/05/index.html (better bring a magnifying glass though).