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Some optimists might believe that Microsoft suffered a setback last week that will impede its progress toward world domination, but I suspect that the company has already found a way to prevail.
At issue before the European Union was Microsoft's
bundling of its Media Player
with its Windows
operating system. Some competitors -- companies that also
make multi-media software -- brought the action.
Microsoft's response was that it is the company's business,
not any government's, to decide what to include in its
products.
Why does this stuff matter?
Let's look at the browser wars
of a few years
ago. Even if Microsoft says that the company must preserve
its freedom to innovate,
it's hard to think of
anything that Microsoft invented, and it certainly didn't
invent the web browser.
The World Wide Web, and a browser to use it, were invented in late 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, the joint European particle-physics laboratory in Geneva. It was a way for physicists to share their findings.
As a consumer product, the first browser came from the federal government in 1993: Mosaic, from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. It was refined into what became Netscape Navigator.
Microsoft didn't build a browser until 1995, when it released Internet Explorer. By making it part of the Windows package that came installed on most new computers, Microsoft was able to build market share, so that by 1999, it was the most popular browser.
Now to get somewhat technical. Web pages are written in HTML: Hyper Text Mark-up Language. Basically, it means applying tags to text, and the browser interprets the tags to find out how to display the material -- frames, headlines, subheads, links to other web pages, graphics, etc.
Now, suppose there were tags that only a Microsoft browser could properly interpret. Most people wouldn't notice, since most people now use Internet Explorer.
But there are those of us who use other browsers (for
some reason, Microsoft does not make a version of Explorer
that runs in Linux), and we do encounter websites which
won't display properly, because they use Microsoft-specific
tags, rather than generic HTML. I have also run across some
that provide messages like MS IE 5.0 or better required
to access this site.
The net effect of this is to push people toward using Microsoft products. It also discourages anyone from building a better browser -- who will buy one if there's already a free one on the computer? So in the long run, Microsoft's bundling discourages innovation.
The same is true of media players. If Microsoft offers a free one, why build a better one? And if the process encourages the use of Microsoft proprietary formats, rather than publicly available standards, then so much the better for Microsoft, if not for the rest of us.
So in geekland, these things do matter, and since computers are so much a part of everyday life now, these things eventually matter to society.
Just how much Microsoft could matter became apparent to
me when I was working on the website I maintain for our
little magazine (www.cozine.com). It has two site-specific
search engines -- one from Freefind,
which provides
the service in exchange for displaying ads with the search
results, and the other from Google.
I read that Microsoft was preparing to challenge Google, and that part of the competition would be offering a site-specific Microsoft search engine. I decided to look into adding that feature because it might make our site more useful.
Then I read the terms of use for adding MSN search to
your site,
and among them was You may not display
the Search Graphic on any Web site that disparages
Microsoft or its products or services.
In other words, your freedom of expression on your own website is limited to what pleases Microsoft. Now observe that Microsoft plans to compete directly against Google. And note that Microsoft can build its bundled browser to make it difficult to use other search engines, and easy to use Microsoft's.
In a few years, any simple Internet searching will doubtless tell us that Microsoft engineers invented the light bulb, the telegraph and the wheel; that Linux is one of those words that the FCC says you can't broadcast; and that Steve Ballmer walks on water while Bill Gates floats above.
Some people may write about the good old days before Microsoft got control of the Internet, but you won't be able to find their work on the web.
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