No matter how you slice it, and no matter <who> points <what_finger>
at <whom>, the simple fact remains that Microsoft itself
egregiously and permanently broke Windows in their zeal to "prove" to the Federal court that IE was and must be "an inextricable part of" Windows.
That's exactly what they set out to do ... and it's basically what they
did ... but in the process of doing so they thrust a huge lance right through Windows' security structure.
"A single, global, shared Registry" was always the Achilles heel of the Win32 design, and nothing (not even a baroque structure of "hives") has improved upon that. Even though the Registry
could be protected by a baroque system of ACL's, pragmatically speaking no one
does attempt this, and those who do are quickly driven back as not only third-party applications but Microsoft's own operating system updates fail to install.
Microsoft's bull-headed determination to prove its pointless point
caused the Internet Explorer
browser to have what no "browser" ever should have ... a highly privileged, globally-encompassing, highly-pervasive place in "the Windows scheme of things," and the privileges and access that goes along with such an un-deserved and ill-advised status. Microsoft cannot, and will not, reverse this position because to admit such would be perjury (as if there remains a single judge who has not been quite fully "compensated" enough to look the other way).
This, of course, delivers a huge boost to Linux, as well as to OS/X and to any "other" system that is smart enough to know that the
operating system and the
user's shell-environment are
not the same thing... that users must be just as free to choose their web-browser (
or to choose not to have any browser at all!) from among a free-market of selections as they are with any other application program.
This is especially true of browsers, which by their very nature are controlled in their behavior by whatever HTML and/or Java and/or VBScript program a website may contain. Browsers, by their very nature,
trust any website they happen to meet: trust it enough to
execute whatever programming that website may happen to contain! This would not be devastating were it not for the fact that the browser has an unusually-powerful status in the Windows world.
Microsoft is bull-headed with respect to
browsers because they wish to be bull-headed about what really makes them money: Internet and other
servers. They frankly want
their web-technologies (and none other) to be "the only ones that exist" ...
... and they
still stubbornly refuse to admit that
they have lost that battle and will never regain it. The Internet is
not, and will never be, a "Microsoft-centered, Microsoft-only world." Microsoft won't admit this, won't acknowledge it, even with the resulting damage that occurs every day to
its own customers. Some of those customers are voting with their wallets.
They're not walking away from Microsoft because they particularly
want to. And they're not doing it because it saves them money. They're actually spending a lot of money to do it, even when they adopt "free"
(sic...) systems such as Linux. They're doing it because Microsoft is driving them away: because Microsoft is pursuing
its own business strategy literally at the expense of their customers. Because Microsoft has "breathed its own .. air
.." long enough to genuinely
believe, in its heart of hearts, that what
it wants is really "what our customers want, too, if only they were enlightened enough to know it." (Sorry, buckwheat, in the real world of business, it's what
customers require that really counts, and customers will fulfill those requirements with-or-without you.)
Monopolists are like that, alas. Believing that the whole world will be shaped by their own monopolies even long after that power has slipped forever from their grasp. (Remember Wang? Why, they had 80% market-share on dedicated word-processing machines! Every lawyer in the US had several! Does ...
anybody ... remember ... Wang?)
That's why monopolies, though beloved by governments and lawyers, never succeed for long. "The whole rest of the world just won't wait for Microsoft." And even IBM, a
vastly bigger, richer and older company with a very long history of monopolism, knows that now.
It will only be a matter of time before some judge and jury finally screws up the nerve to rule that
computer software, especially operating system software, is not and should not be exempt from the usual rules about product-liability. All of us, in the Linux world and without, should be fully and un-blinkingly prepared for this development when it finally comes.
