Microsoft controls the current PC software market and has a de facto
monopoly on the desktop. This monopoly has not been achieved and is
not being maintained by offering the user community better products
than Microsoft's competitors can offer. On the contrary, Microsoft has
earned a reputation for selling unreliable products, thrown together
from third-party technology, full of bugs and security holes, and
in need of constant maintenance and repair. Windows is a technically
inferior operating system with a seriously flawed architecture, a weak
security model and sloppy code, while other Microsoft applications are
equally kludgey. New Microsoft products are essentially re-wrapped bits
of old technology which offer no essential improvements over previous or
competing products, and with a Return On Investment between small and
zero. In spite of this Microsoft boasts about about being innovative
and customer-driven.
Instead of making better software,
Microsoft has focused on using brilliant but doubtful marketing tactics
to force their products upon the user community in order to establish
and maintain their monopoly. These methods include a tight integration
of applications into the operating system, the bundling of applications
with Windows to force competing application vendors out of the market,
the mandatory bundling of Windows with new computer equipment, deliberate
limitations in the compatibility of their own software with competing
products, contracts that prohibit third parties to do business with
anyone but Microsoft, and retaliatory practices against non-cooperating
vendors. In addition to this, third-party developers are induced, through
cheap or free development programs and the sabotaging of alternatives,
to develop applications based upon proprietary methods of interfacing
with the operating system. This results in third-party applications
that are virtually non-portable, which in turn locks both developers
and users into the MS-Windows platform.
These methods only serve to further inflate Microsoft's already obscene profit margins, at the price of the interests of the user community, the IT market and the field of computer technology as a whole.
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