[XCSSA] More Micro$oft evil

[Charles Peterson]

Some other predatory practices I believe M$ has engaged in:

1) Requiring computer manufacturers to pay for Windows licenses for
every machine sold, regardless of whether Windows was actually
installed by the manufacturer.  (You had to do that to get the best
OEM price on Windows.)  I believe M$ was specifically ordered NOT to
do this in a court settlement in the mid 1990's, opening the way for
vendors to pre-install some other system such as linux.  But M$ had
been doing this for years.

(Only Standard Oil did this even better in the 1890's.  They not only
got the cheapest rate for themselves, they contracted with railroads
to _pay_ Standard Oil whenever they shipped a competitor's oil,
guaranteeing that competitors would have to pay more.  If a railroad
didn't agree, Standard Oil took their massive business elsewhere.  Not
to be undone, competitors were forced to build pipelines to move their
oil economically.  But only the biggest could afford to build
pipelines, so all the small operators were squeezed out of existance.
Railroads also wouldn't grant easements to pipelines, making it much
more expensive to build them.  Even today, you will find that
pipelines usually run parallel to but a few miles from the railroad
tracks, a legacy of the Oil and Railroad wars of the 1890's.)

2) Bundling IIS (the web server, not the browser) with the "Server"
edition of Windows NT (in the NT 3-4 era, at least).  This was one of
the major reasons why the "Server" edition cost a lot more than the
"Workstation" edition (~$1000 as compared with ~$200).  But, if you
wanted to buy the cheaper Workstation edition and install somebody
else's web server, you'd be out of luck, because M$ specifically
hobbled the Workstation edition so that it would not perform well with
more than 10 simultaneous clients, and, in fact, you could not license
the Workstation edition for use with more than 10 clients,
simultaneous or not.  So, if you really were setting up a server,
you'd just have to pay $800 for IIS whether you wanted it or not.

This was a deal that O'Reilly (the nutshell book people) tried to make
a big deal about because they had tried to sell a web server for
Window$, but somehow this issue fell below the media and government
radar as compared with the browser bundling deal in 1996-1997.

M$ argued that the server and workstation editions were very different
animals, and you really had to pay for all that extra engineering,
whether or not you wanted IIS.  But some friends of O'Reilly
discovered that there were only two changes to the Registry that made
all the difference (which caused about 48 other internal variables to
change...a clear case of "hobbling").  There were no differences in
the binary instruction code.  Of course, if you tried to change those
Registry settings, a little daemon would change them back and shut
down your system faster than you can say "Blue Screen of Death."

I really thought this tactic, which wiped out most other commercial
web server vendors, was worse than the browser bundling.  Even
Netscape expected to make more money selling webservers than selling
browsers.  From the very beginning, Netscape gave away browsers and
hoped to profit on selling the servers.  They did from time to time
try selling browsers, but most people got them free, and got used to
the idea of free browsers, so it was a very tough sell.  A few
high-end server vendors were able to stay around for awhile by
offering features that IIS didn't have, but it wasn't easy with
Microsoft's built-in $800 price advantage.  Microsoft made billions on
that $800 difference, billion$ to support II$ development and still
other predatory practice$.