Princeton professor Andrew Appel testified that WindowsXP Embedded is living proof that middleware can be safely removed from Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Read more in the ZDNet Focus.
Princeton Professor Says Modular Windows is Possible
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Eugenia Loli
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Of course, anything is possible. I personally would not care if IE/MSMP/etc are bundled or not, since I rarely use MS products.
This is not so much a technical problem, as it is a marketing problem. There are a lot of products out there that use MSIE within their interfaces (Quicken does this). Now, those developers will have to ship IE on their CDs as well, incase the user does not have it. Big deal! Though, this scenario reminds me of the dll hell with vb?run.dll
“If someone committed murder, and then promised to never do it again, should they be allowed free?”
The DOJ probably negotiated with Microsoft for the best deal it was ever going to get. If these nine “hold-out” states insist on pushing for more and more, Microsoft will simply do what the DOJ was most afraid of – drag out the judicial process for many more years until it finally goes to the supreme court, and who knows what will happen.
I have come to the conclusion that business is not “just business” in America. Business is actually dog-eat-dog, tooth-and-nail ruthless competition at it’s utmost with everything short of assassination and murder as fair game. This is especially the case considering that the whole “economic system” is run under a central bank founded on fractional-reserve usury, which is just a form of embedded, institutionalized corruption, to put it bluntly. The whole system is rotten from the top down. Period.
Under such a system, why shouldn’t Microsoft be totally ruthless, even if they are a monopoly, if they calculate that they will probably get away with it – or at least the advantages will always outweigh the drawbacks? Why be ethical in a system that does not ever reward ethics?
Even if Bill Gates wanted to cut Linux (and BeOS) some slack in the marketplace, his stockholders and his employees would crucify him if he tried to do it. They expect the decision-makers to do everything in their power to increase the value of the stock and to hell with anything else. Businesses exist to make profits and for no other reason whatsoever.
I actually don’t care too much how this court case ends up because by its anti-competitive actions and huge successes from them, Microsoft is proving the nature of the whole system for what it truly is – totally corrupt. Just like Standard Oil many years before it did. IMHO, Microsoft is no more evil than the system itself or any other company that has to survive under the system (think about Enron).
The slimmer version of Windows would only be an options for OEMs who wish to use 3rd party middleware. The full blown version of Windows would still be an option.
I think that’s the way it should be!
This would also prevent Microsoft from leveraging it’s monopoly to force it’s other technologies on customers while crushing competitors.
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The slimmer version of Windows would only be an options for OEMs who wish to use 3rd party middleware. The full blown version of Windows would still be an option.
I think that’s the way it should be!
The problem is that the remainder of the states also want MS to guarantee that all products that depend on MS middleware will function properly with 3rd party middleware. Also, the term middleware is not clearly defined in the proposal. Even this testimony states that middleware is ‘software that exposes one or more of its APIs to provide services to other software’. Which could be defined as the entire Win32 API, the .Net framework, Office, the NT kernel, and just about any other piece of software written by MS (except Notepad and some of their games
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That outcome of that trial was decided a long time ago, when bush came to office. The bushies stole a national election, getting MS off the hook will be cake. Of course they are guilty. But that is not what the US jury system is about. It is about politics. Wrong is right when campaign pledges talk.
Free market? Huh! What a joke. Free market has alway meant I have an advantage that i want leverage to beat up on someone to avoid a true free market.
Sun, Sony, etc really need to come to terms with reality. If they want to stop MS’s abuses then they need to do it themselves not with help from this DOJ. They need to come up with a new OS or a disruptive tech that will displace MS. Frankly, i think symbian has it!
From a purly software engineering perspective, it is possible. Might require some extensive rewrites, but sure, it can be done. It’s not one huge number that they compile into Windows the product.
But how in the whole world could they _ever_ support any type of “middleware” out there? This is just plain stupid. This is a personal vendetta by Sun/AOL (which owns Netscape, ICQ, WinAMP, etc) for choosing a bad business model which won’t give them any money. If someone wanted to sell a compatible Linux kernel for $200, would you call them sane?
Microsoft is doing what is the best for their customers, they are integrating and bundling. Which is great unless you think that all the interface you need is a bunch of XTerms and the latest Mozilla. If you want competition, let other OS compete with Windows, let “Linux” (it gets the citationmarks since it’s not one OS, nor anything but a kernel. Linux based OSes would be preferable), MacOS X, and whatever compete instead.
Then if Microsoft is breaking some law saying they can’t act like a monopoly, then punish them for that, not for someones lack of business sense. I personally prefer a real sandbox, it’s more pure than politics, corruption and law…
Removing middleware would cripple the OS, many applications depend on it. It is not good for the consumers for it to be removed (remember, that’s why anti trust laws are for). The only people that would benefit from it are people developing software competing with MS’s middleware.
– Consumers: their products suddenly won’t work for the new version of Windows.
– Third party developers: Spend a lot of time and money dveeloping something that doesn’t rely on MS’s middleware and going backward to support the new OS
– Microsoft: have a significant decrease in sales because many applications aren’t ported to the new MS OS. Also, significant increase of use of other competitor’s OS.
Microsoft does indeed have a right to do whatever they like with their own OS. That right is also available to competitors and they use it. For example, if Apple was a monopoly, it would be in the courtroom for a long time.
The only people I see opposing the settlement is people that are zealots towards these middleware competitors and zealots of OS competitors.
[quote]The slimmer version of Windows would only be an options for OEMs who wish to use 3rd party middleware. The full blown version of Windows would still be an option. [/quote]
A stripped down version won’t be used by OEMs because most applications won’t work on it.
[quote]This would also prevent Microsoft from leveraging it’s monopoly to force it’s other technologies on customers while crushing competitors. [/quote]
What company doesn’t crush competitors. If they don’t crush competitors, the competitors would crush them. Apple bundled multimedia applications with their computers, Microsoft have to follow so that people wouldn’t look down on them. BeOS had a web browser, Microsoft copied. Microsoft is in fact doing what competitors are doing. It’s totally unfair to say that Microsoft because it’s an monopoly must play fair and nice while competitors don’t.