Hello again my minions... Uh... I mean readers.

I am back from my stint in the FFXI world come to speak to you about an important topic; The EU's punishment of Microsoft for violating anti-trust laws.

Now don't get me wrong; Micro$oft is an evil corporation. I say this not because I support an alternative operating system. I say this because they behave under the same rules that are used to describe lawful evil in the D&D system. And I agree that Microsoft should be punished for their misbehavior as a business. In their attempt to rule the information technology universe, they have squashed literally hundreds of up and coming companies, as well as several major competitors.

But I?m not writing about how I agree with the EU, what kind of blog would that be? Instead I'm writing to discuss one of the many (and once before issued) punishments that the EU is considering: the separation of the browser and media player from the shell.

"Shell? What do you mean shell? It's an operating system, not a turtle!" Ah... Now we come to an important point that most people miss: Microsoft Windows Explorer, the part that we, the users, interact with, is a GUI written to run on the Microsoft Windows operating system. This is an important distinction that anyone who's worked with the *nix clones is very familiar with. An operating system (like Linux) is really of no use without a shell like BASH or CSH or X Windows with an appropriate window manager (like KDE, a good choice for analogy that I'll refer to later). However, the 'integrated parts' that the EU might propose (and the US courts demanded) to be removed, are parts of the shell, not the OS. And, like CSH and BASH in Linux, you can change the shell that runs on Windows (anyone remember Norton Desktop for Windows?)

But this little semantic is far too trivial for my discussion; instead, I plan to approach a much more important issue. To introduce this, let's begin with a similar situation with slightly different details. Let's consider Ford Motor Corporation. Pretend that they developed a car back in the 80's. Then they took that car and tweaked it. As time went on they design a computer that can be used to display your car's location and other important information to the driver. Then some guy at Ford says, 'Hey, know what? We could integrate this new bit of hardware into the car to automatically control the transmission, which will let us completely remove the complicated hydraulic systems that are currently used to run it!' And the big shots pat him on the back as tell him to do it because it will save hundreds of dollars in the manufacture of the car, make the transmission lighter, easier to replace, and allow the driver to tweak their transmission without having to know a lot of gruesome details. Now, let's add in another variable; let's consider that Ford has been buying up all the other motor companies in hopes that they will be the only auto maker in the country, maybe the world. However, the government is wise to this plan and charges them with an anti-trust suit. As punishment, Ford may not include this new computer control system into their car, and instead must make the transmission not only work the way it used to, but also must make it possible for other companies to put their automatic transmission control systems into Ford cars, even though you could put in a new display computer without having to change out the old one.

There, now that we've setup the playing field, let's make the analogy. The transmission is the Shell, the computer control system is Internet Explorer, and Ford is Microsoft (duh...) Ok. Now, it should be clear to everyone who has ever done product development that by integrating I.E. a browser component into their shell, they could save themselves literally thousands of lines of code, hundreds of hours of testing, and millions of dollars. This would also give I.E. the ability to behave like a file folder for things like FTP, while continuing to be perfectly inter-compatible with the Shell, since they where actually the same software package. What the EU might ask them to do is start over and completely re-write the shell, completely excluding the I.E. integration. Based on this premise, KDE, a popular Linux window manager, should also be required to de-integrate the Konqueror software from their system. With KDE it's clearly a stupid thing to suggest, and is equally stupid to request that it be removed from Windows Explorer.

So why are they suggesting this? To be honest, I have no idea. If Microsoft had code in the API to make it impossible to write other browsers, I could understand a request by the courts to remove said code. But I happily have run I.E., Mozillia, Lynx, and Opera SIMULTANEOUSLY on the same machine (why? It's a long story...) No such code exists.




- posted by Jim The Cactus @ 3/22/2004 03:53:19 PM | Permalink | (0) Comments. Add your own!