{"id":34,"date":"2004-05-05T17:34:17","date_gmt":"2004-05-05T22:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/server97.snhdns.com\/~ravik\/wp\/?p=34"},"modified":"2004-05-05T17:34:17","modified_gmt":"2004-05-05T22:34:17","slug":"damned-if-you-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200405\/damned-if-you-do\/","title":{"rendered":"Damned if you do&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/news\/digiwood\/0,1412,62617,00.htm\">complicated download process<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, I&#8217;ve heard people cribbing about IE because, you know, it does <i>not<\/i> 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.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nSo 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? <\/p>\n<p>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&#8230; the fewer copies of your product you sell. <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t tell you in advance what is the right thing to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}