My Opinions

The Microsoft Antitrust Trial

Is Microsoft Evil.  Your Opionion?

One could most definately say that Microsoft is in fact guilty of playing hardball. They have definately been known to use strong handed tactics. For example, Their license to OEM's used to cover every machine they sold reguardless of wheather it had windows on it or not.

The question though is do they have a monopoly on the PC operating system. I would have to say that they are the only viable PC operating system out there. Now before you linux or BeOS fans go off the deep end, give me a chance to fully explain. Windows has the most hardware and application vendor support, and it has a decent ratio of ease of use compared to stability. BeOS while a great, fast, and stable OS, doesn't have enough hardware or application support. Linux on the PC, (Note I said PC not server) while rather stable, can be very hard to use especially for a beginner. On the plus side, Linux has made great strides in hardware and application support in the last few years. Having the source code is a big plus to, but for the most part only the "techies" really need it. Apple, well their OS doesn't run on the PC (and by PC I mean x86 instruction set). At this time I don't think Microsoft has a monopoly, but at the time of the incident that started the anti-trust trial, I believe they did.

So, the question is "What do we do with Microsoft." Personally I would love to have open source Windows. It would be cool to run a fully optimized for my system version of windows. However, that is not in my opinion a viable alternative. I don't think sanctioning or fining then is viable either. I think they should be broken up four ways: Hardware, Operating system, Applications, Games.