You know why the EU fined Microsoft recently? Because it bundled Windows Media Player along with its operating system, so that people. Windows Media Player, is a very basic program, but the advantage is that people who just need to listen to a song can do so without going through a complicated download process.
On the other hand, I’ve heard people cribbing about IE because, you know, it does not provide native popup blocking capability, unlike superior browsers like FireFox. But then IE also provides an excellent toolkit which enables people like Google to come up with their own toolbars which incorporate popup blocking.
So which is it people? Is Microsoft a villain for providing too many features or not providing enough features? Is Microsoft a villain for serving its customers (and hence throttling competitors) or not serving its customers enough?
All software decisions are business decisions and business decisions involve trade-offs. If you give too much choice to users, they get confused. If you give too little choice, everyone will complain about not having their pet feature. You can rush to market and release a product with many bugs or you can wait forever and risk getting your product obsolete. The more features you add, the more complex your product becomes and the greater the chance that it has bugs. The less features it has… the fewer copies of your product you sell.
There are dozens of trade-offs that I can think of. You can fault Microsoft for doing this and not doing that, but if you want to convict or break up Microsoft for that, you are writing laws which won’t tell you in advance what is the right thing to do.
You know what, this is exactly what I have been saying to my friends. That Microsoft is just giving what the majority wants. You cant give everybody everything, but that shouldnt stop you from giving something to everybody.
Nice argument. On a related note, this was something I picked up on the net somewhere,
When there was talk of splitting up microsft, one employee of MS went around saying and I quote “If they can’t handle 1 Microsft, how are they gonna handle two microsft when hey split us?”
You know what, this is exactly what I have been saying to my friends. That Microsoft is just giving what the majority wants. You cant give everybody everything, but that shouldnt stop you from giving something to everybody.
Nice argument. On a related note, this was something I picked up on the net somewhere,
When there was talk of splitting up microsft, one employee of MS went around saying and I quote “If they can’t handle 1 Microsft, how are they gonna handle two microsft when hey split us?”
I see I have made quit a few typos. Darned keyboard doesnt respond the way I want it to. (Maybe somebody can come up with a software that makes the keyboard sound an alarm when I type something wrong. dunno 😉 )
Anyways, I digress. Sorry for the typos. And sorry for the two comments. And for this third one.
The point is, inspite of having less features than other Web Browsers/OSes, Microsoft products are buggier.
In case you do not know, Mozilla provides a more powerful toolkit for plugins (or extensions as they are called) and is yet thousand times more secure than Internet Explorer. Same logic goes with Windows.