A Look at Microsoft's Regulatory Problems

jrexilius writes: "The Economist has a great article on the state of the EUs anti-trust case against microsoft, background, and future troubles with google. One interesting comment was 'Microsoft is preparing to use its dominance in web-browser and operating-system software to promote itself in yet another separate market--search engines this time'."

The most important bits

[Space cowboy]

... are that

1) MS might be forced to either bundle competitors (Go Ogg!) or disable Windows media (which the commission don't seem to fancy)

2) The commissioners claim to have learnt from the mistakes of other regulators when dealing with MS, and have pre-emptively included a number of 'you can't do it *this* way' examples in their recommendations :-))

Simon

Cool Search Engines

[iamwahoo2]

There are a lot of unknown quality search engines out there. One of the tricks with search engines is knowing which was is going to turn up the best results in a particular search. In addition to google, I highly recommend www.alltheweb.com, and dogpile.com.

But one that I have really come to like is vivisimo.com, check it out, and after performing a search ecspecially take a look at the "preview" feature

Re:Well, really

[andih8u]

Utilities are what's referred to as naturalized monopolies quickdraw

Re:Search engines are a "low cost" change

[shaitand]

Man are you off. You realize that most users STILL do not know the address bar exists or what it is for? There are a huge number of users typing web addresses they are given in the MSN or AOL search box.

Since typing the address in the search box generally brings up the link they think that is how it's done and never know better.

Trust me, these people are just using whatever is there, not changing to anything.

True story. An old man called who had recently bought a windows pc from our shop. He said he was having trouble with his computer, so I talked with him about several minor issues, helped him get the bar back to the bottom on the screen (he had it docked on the left side and expanded to half the screen), typical user. At some point I suggest he use google for searching and gave him the address.

A month later his modem went out and I went onsite for the service call, after fixing his modem I searched for cleaned off the spyware on his system and launched his browser. Msn.com. "So you didn't go for google eh?" I asked. "No I love it, I use it all the time!" he exclaimed and proceeded to tell me how great google is, I let him take the chair. I turns out he has been starting his internet use by typing www.goole.com into the MSN searchbar and then clicking it, then doing his searches from google.

The guy though msn search was where you put web addresses and google was a search engine where you search for terms. I think I tried setting google as his home page but he didn't get it, I think he ended up having a kid or grandson change it back.

Moral of the story, people are idiots. Just accept that and you will be much happier in life.

Re:Fishy company

[NortWind]

Win 3.1 could run on top of MS-DOS or on top of DR-DOS (Digital Research DOS.) When you would start Win 3.1 on DR-DOS you would get an error message (that said ERROR) unsuportted OS detected. This effectively killed the ability of third party PC makers to sell DR-DOS + Win 3.1 preinstalled. Here is one site [stanford.edu] that gives the story. (Features Caldera too, eh.)