Cheating and predatory pracitices?! I have to laugh. You do not know anything about business. The old saying, "All is fair in love and war," is and always will be applied to business.

In this business, if you fall asleep, you will be left behind. MS did nothing wrong by offering free products with its OS. That is what the public wanted. It was only for a short time that people found IE more user friendly. Only techies and their relation kept using Netscape(primarily because of their hatred towards MS). Same with firefox. MS didn't make us use Windows over Linux, but had better marketing techniques. Windows is very user friendly and in part users have someone they know that can help them with their problems, but with Linux or Mac(not so much now)there is the element of the unknown. Not user friendly or able to use the same popular programs as the Windows user. Fault by design, not MS.

It wasn't illegal for MS to offer IE with the OS, and in doing so, did push competition off their platform. But through this integration, intentionally cause those competitor programs to crash, which was. However, this is old news and they paid for it.

In this story, they overcharged for their OS and got caught, again, paying for it. They are still not different than the next business, and seems more commonplace for such practices to happen in today's business world. Only MS is under the gun and being watched very carefully.

If we owned this business or one like it, we would use similar business tactics to keep the edge in the market.(Yes you would and would be stupid not to). We are not talking espionage, but bending the rules a bit. It isn't immoral, it is business. Look at Intel and and Sony.

It is funny to hear some of you talk about immoral behavior, but continue to download mp3s or hack software. Come on! I think it is more fun to watch the companies that hated each other then, now coming together and joining partnerships.

IMO

netscape has always been free, IE has always been free. If for some strange reason you bought it, that's your bad. I used Netscape when they had a good browser, then IE just provided a more featureful product while....Netscape sitting in the corner b****ing about IE forgot to advance their product farther than just changing the "look and feel" of it.

When I tried going back to Netscape years after IE5 came out, I asked, where are all the built-in plugins? where's the DHTML/XML support? nadda until way after IE had already packed all this stuff in.

Nobody stopped Netscape from including Netscape media plugins in their browser to make it more convenient for their users to just Download and Browse, except their own devel team.

I use Firefox now, but that's only because I switched to linux and just adapted ;-p
If Netscape were a significantly superior product, I would've paid for it over the free IE, but it wasn't significantly superior in any way at all, at least in my experience. MS also didn't stop anyone from downloading any new browsers, I always had Netscape/IE/Opera installed back in the day when they were "cheating"...somehow.

Maybe taking advantage of how some people didn't know any better, but, those who actually knew half a cent about a computer weren't cheated at all. IF you picked windows as your main OS, that's your bad, you have all the choice in the world, and Linux has always been capable of operating just as effectively, you just have to KNOW how to do it; have reasonably experienced/intelligent IT staff that know how to do more than windows, etc.

What's one billion dollars here or there? For Microsoft it's nothing. If I had the money I'd pay one billion dollars to see Netscape put down too.

Microsoft did not put Netscape out of business.

First!
There was never the need to pay for the browsers.

Second!
Netscape was so crappy that it crashes all the time.

Third!
Netscape had to die due to natural selection!

You all agreed to these!

Sorry dude, Netscape had a lot more than one free product. They had a lot of software they were selling and it was cutting edge stuff in its day, way ahead of the competition. Microsoft offered to buy Netscappe out, they refused. Netscape then becaame the fastest growing software company in history and had huge buy-in from the stock markket. Internal memos from Microsoft at that time said essentially as follows;

"We will cut off Netscape's air supply, anything they sell we will give away for free till they are out of business"

Predatory bussiness practices like those are why Microsoft is being sued by everyone, and why everyone is winning.

Get the facts BEFORE you open your mouth, black-wolf.

What about the fact?
That is the fact!

Netscape obviously had a bad plan without plan B. Let's get this real.

The fact for every business is to compete against each other, so welcome to the real world. So there are always winners and losers.

Microsoft kicked Netscape's butt real good. Doesn't it look the same as DELL kicking other small computer merchants' butts?

Again, there was nothing wrong with Microsoft's strategy of pushing out Internet Explorer back then. IE was a superior product and proven to be far more better than Netscape otherwise everyone would still be using netscape till this day even if we have to download it. Remember Mozilla FireFox? :)

People sueing Microsoft because they are just plain greedy. Since they can't win the fight with real skill so they rout to the big mama hoping to backstab MS from behind.

Netscape and IE were both $45 products in 1997.

Microsoft saw Netscape as a threat and bolted IE to Windows for free.

Netscape nearly died due to loss of sales.

You cannot 'kick butt' by cheating, I guess thats how 14 year olds like you see the world hey? Cheating = winning?

How is it cheating?

I remembered back in the day when Netscape is the s***, then come IE 2.0 change everything. MS was making constant improvements to IE until 6.0 (which it capture like 90+% of the market) while Netscape just sat there and did nothing. They could have change their business model and still compete with MS. They can distribute their software for free with ad support and giving the option to buy the full version. But what they did? NOTHING. They just don't have good business people.

That's the real world.

Do you dare to swear to God that you never cheated?

Tell me if there are people who won their wars without cheating, in any country...

This modern era is now "Big Company & Franchise" era. Who has deep pocket wins... althought I personally dislike that fact but it is the truth.

Please don't insult people by calling them kids. It's really rude of you.

Look guy, I'm just here reporting the facts.

The FACT is that Microsoft is getting their a** sued off BECAUSE of their predatory business tactics, there is no way to deny that especially in light of the fact that all the lawsuits against them win! I am not comparing myself to Microsoft, why would I? But I can say this, if I had a huge business I would never run it the way Bill Gates an co. have done.

Forget it, you people are too stupid to even read the previous posts before you spew some useless craap on here.

I am gone.

This is all because of Microsoft putting Netscape out of business. You ever sit and think about how many people lost billions of dollars on Netscape stock? Lots. Now they are getting revenge.

And keep in mind Microsoft did not exactly bbeat Netscape 'fair and square', if they had, I bet a lot of this would not be happening to them now.

Its karma baby, and they deserve it.

How can you be overcharged? The retail price is the reail price. If consumers were too stupid to notice the price, then that's their fault. I can charge $500.00 for a candy bar. If that's what consumer's paid because of the price written on the candy bar, then that's on the consumer, not the manufacturer..

One industry does this and gets away with it.. Automboile sales. They charge whatever they can get away with.. should they be sued too? The sticker price shows one thing, but its only a "suggestion", MSRP (manufacturers SUGGESTED retail price). If you sign the papers, and you agree to the price, its over.

This suit is derivative of MS being declared a monopoly. While it's simple not to buy a $500.00 cany bar, not using MS Windows was not quite as simple for the general public.

Any retail shelf or even mail-order computer company generally built the cost of Windows into the machine, with no option to buy a window-less computer. Moreover, while RedHat Linux has long sat on store shelves, it is certainly not as well known or commonly used, and thus users looking to buy or upgrade their operating system were forced to pay MS's price, with no reasonable alternative.

In reality, the only alternative there has been for the masses to Windows is Macintosh, and that requires the purchase of entirely new hardware.

Being a resident of CA, I am a "victim" of MS in this case, having bought it's operating system on several occasiosn. However I saw the $5-10 they wanted to throw my way as not worth the paperwork I would need to fill out to get it.

On a personal note, I don't believe MS price-gouged, moreover I don't even believe they were a monopoly, at least not in the way specified. I have a much larger problem with their exclusive deals with retailers than incorporating IE into Windows (which seemed to be the main point of the Anti-Trust hearings).

Hmm.. you know that's the first time I have seen anyone notice that besides myself. Everytime I bring this up, people think I work for MS or I own stock. Why can't I just have an opinion? I am glad to see I am not the only one that is crazy for thinking that MS was doing what the customer asked for. I remember specifically when Windows 95 was in beta, people were complaining that there was no browser integration, there were no apps included, other than notepad, which is why early comments regarded windows as "Notepad on steroids". No one remembers those days, but anyway..

I like your personal note, and its good to see someone else noticed that exclusive deals, while agreed by companies (Microsoft can't force it on a company to agree) did appear to be a monopolistic practice.. I will agree to that point.

Don't get me wrong, I like my Mac, but Mac makes you buy their hardware with their software. Isn't this worse than what Microsoft is doing? All PCs at least allow you to install something else, but with a Mac, you're just screwed. Give it around 2-3 years and the class-action suits will start with Apple, and then you'll see Apple's already extremely high prices get even higher.

I bet if Microsoft didn't have to pay greedy people and governments settlements because they are "the big bad boy" company, the prices would be extremely cheaper.

I'm for free software. I love it. I read in the news all the time how everyone things software should be free and all that stuff. Why is everyone still mad that microsoft released a pretty good product for free? It put a company out of business, but I'm sure the popularity of Mambo/Joomla has put a few CMS-developing companies out of business as well.

Oh well. Everyone will still keep fighting about this, but thats all I have to say.