Microsoft Should Be Punished For What They Did To Netscape
from the counter-point dept
Here's Salon's "part II" counter point to yesterday's article about why Netscape has no case against Microsoft. Obviously, this one is taking the other side and saying that Microsoft must be punished for what they did to Netscape. While I do think that Microsoft deserves to be punished for many of their actions, I have to admit that I'm much more convinced by the first argument that Netscape doesn't have much of a case. There is a lot more evidence that Netscape hurt themselves. In the second article the writer simply brushes over that idea. In fact, he claims (as if it were fact) that Netscape would have kept their 80% market share even if they offered an inferior product. Huh? Does anyone actually believe that? Once IE started getting better, people found plenty of reasons to switch. While perhaps the OEM agreements hurt some of Netscape's marketshare, I'd say the fact that they couldn't keep up in building a better browser is what destroyed them.
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Yes, this one was won by MS
Why? Because IE genuinely works better! On my cable connection, pages snap into place on IE but grind slowly into view in Communicator 4.79... and 6 only marginally improves things. Not to mention the fact that Communicator dies about 10% of the time on pages with even semi-complex javascript in them.
Sure, there are a LOT of things still wrong with IE... but this is one instance at least where MS seems to be the least worst mainstream choice right now.
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Re: Yes, this one was won by MS
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many would argue
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Re: many would argue
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Microsoft should be punished period...
I mostly don't like the fact that if I didn't want to use IE, and I got rid of it, Windows would explode.
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