[aclug-L] Re: Another reason to dislike Microsoft's tactics

[Nate Bargmann <n0nb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* Bruce Bales <bbales@xxxxxxxxxxx> [2002 Jan 03 16:24 -0600]:
> 
> My grand-daughter found a way to share her photos - MSN Photos.  
> Unfortunately, it is just another
> deliberate attempt to stifle competition.  Other browsers, other operating 
> systems can't use it.

Borne of low ethics? Of course, however, your granddaughter is not
limited to MSN to place her photos on the Web.  Yahoo offers the same
service without the lockin and my sister is using Yahoo for just this
purpose.  I'm not a great fan of Yahoo and there are likely other
alternatives, but it's likely she chose MSN because "it was already on her
computer" in the form of convenient bookmarks in IE.  Of course, NS 6.x
and Mozilla are chock full of these "handy" bookmarks as well.  There is 
certainly nothing wrong with new users having a nice starting point
(even though when *I* got on the Internet *I* had to find my own
bookmarks ;-).

Even though this tactic on the part of MS is stupid, and certainly not
becoming a good Netizen, it doesn't matter much to me.  What is
interesting, is that I have used espn.com to find out the bowl game
schedules the past two weeks and it is hosted on MSN, but it had no
problems dealing with Mozilla 0.9.7 on Debian Linux.  I'm sure ESPN
doesn't want to block itself from even a minority of viewers and MSN (or
whoever writes their pages) must comply.

On the other hand, this is the sneakiest and probably not (yet)
an illegal way to leverage their monopoly.  After all what is more
innocent than your friends and family using the "latest technology" and
for you to enjoy their creation(s) you must run the same "latest
technology" as they?  To Joe User there is no reasonable alternative, is
there?  For if there were, surely CompUSA, Walmart, Sears, or where ever
he buys his machine would offer it, wouldn't they?

- Nate >>

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