Nemesis, Nemesis...Nemesis.....Whew...you must be an attorney 
(i tip my hat to you)
No need to be nasty, I dislike lawyers as a class as much as the next guy. I have no legal training at all. I have however observed a lot of legal issues in multiple countries in respect to the computer industry over a long period of time.
Groklaw has been an excellent source in regard to U.S. cases.
(imho) I don't think the antitrust suit scares them a bit...keyword here is (again) It has happen before, it will happen again.. we as a consumer just don't know when these things will happen, it's all just speculation to us.. but we do have time and experience on our side to know when a good deal is (not so good), Now I'm not a coder like SCM_SFHQ_XC, but I was told that older OS's like 98SE and 2000 are written without a certain code for tracking purposes..which make them a GREAT OS for hackers...I don't know.. that's just what I was told..
Antitrust terrifies them.
They came within a hairs breath of breakup last time in the U.S.. If Al Gore had won the Presidential election I believe they would have been. (
DON'T take that as an excuse ANYONE to start a political discussion here )
In the EU they faced and paid fines in excess of $1 billion USD AND were forced to change their ways and document many of their interfaces for free use by their competitors. The only reason the fines didn't go higher is the MS caved, the EU wouldn't back down. IE use has been dropping for a long time but the Antitrust decisions in the EU has accelerated it there.
As far as the Google acquisition..we all saw this coming..and MS has been trying to buy the entire market since IBM and TI fell under there umbrella..why fight your competitors when you can own them? that also has been going on throughout our entire history. empires have been made and civilizations have crumbled under that kind of power. look at it this way..what if..(warren buffet, bill gates and Jay-z formed a union) now that would be crazy power to say the least.
What Google acquisition? No way that would pass antitrust law.
Microsoft has been pushing (a matter of public record) against Google to the DOJ in regards to Googles dominance of the online search and advertising market. I don't think they will be successful in any legal way due to the fact I haven't seen evidence of Google using that monopoly to block competitors or extend their monopoly to other products/fields.
98 thru XP might be ancient, but that does not mean anything in usefulness..come on.. everyone is complaining about vista this and 7 that so much it's killing me..Trust me I understand better than most, that if you don't make something new you run the risk of losing it all.
coders need work, programmers need work. etc etc etc..
but here is an example ( I have XP and I'm running office XP...soon they released Office03, ok no problem I upgrade then....pop.. out comes vista..opps Office03 does'nt work on vista only Office07...now I have to import all my 03 doc's to 07...any new 07 doc's won't work in my XP machins using 03..now there's 7 with Office10...don't forget nothing works in 64bit..
Just because it is useful does not require Microsoft to continue supporting it. The same for any other software.
MS has had there security cracked before..it was on TV, something about there firewall was shut down for a couple of days..
They have but not to the degree that would be required to insert a "bug" into their Windows upgrade repositories without them noticing. That would be too big an issue and high lights the whole "Windows Monoculture" issue.
The motherboard issue....code is code right...all 11001001000111010 there doing something to the boards, I just don't know what.
Many of the features that newer motherboards have don't have support within older OSs. Also how many people are going to buy a mother board that supports multicore chips to run Win98 (single core inherently) on it? Would you want to write the code to support SATA and USB 3 under Win98? Then there are issues with newer CPUs that are faster than the older software was designed for. (As an example one AMD CPU ran certain Windows code too fast above 300mhz and MS had to patch it, it fouled timing loops).
Unless Microsoft can be shown to have "influenced them" to not support older OSs there is no case for blaming them. If such evidence were to be found then they should be nailed for it.
There have been memos from Microsoft indicating that they SHOULD try to make power management only compatible with Windows as they felt their efforts shouldn't benefit their competitors (and ignored the fact that they were not the only company involved and the other companies had rights too). I think that should be investigated to see if MS managed to do something as the memo indicated.
Topic: WARNING!!! Microsoft Sabotaging WinXP? (Read 7735 times)