John Doe writes:

Read the factual story about how Microsoft destroyed Netscape
Navigator. It's free and easy to access in many different places on
the Internet, including right here.

Read the stories about how Netscape destroyed itself. The company had
incompetent management from day one. Its Navigator succeeded only
because there were no competitors; as soon as there were, it failed.
It's a great case study in truly bad management.

That's because Microsoft owns the required operating system.

Microsoft didn't always own the operating system. Even so, it managed
to succeed. Others can do the same, but they must be at least as well
managed as Microsoft.

The fact that Microsoft holds monopoly power over the desktop
operating system market is a fact that has been well known to most
of us computer savvy users long before it was proven in federal
court.

That has nothing to do with applications. Borland hit the skids
because of poor management. Netscape failed because of poor
management, too. There are many examples.

That coming from Steve Ballmer's book?

It's something that an unbiased observer can scarcely ignore.

Even if that were true, the easy explanation would be because they
know nothing else.

It is true, and they don't want to know anything else.

What geeks fail to understand is that most people see computers as
appliances--something they must use to accomplish some other task.
Usually the task is much more interesting than the tool. They have no
emotional attachment to their computers, or to the software running on
their computers. They don't care about "choice," any more than they
care about the colors available for the agitators in their washing
machines. It doesn't matter to them. They use what's there, they get
the job done, and they live the rest of their life, the life they have
away from the computer. That's how the real world works.

Nobody "suffers" from the current arrangement except a handful of
geeks who hate Microsoft, and a handful of companies who are too
incompetent to compete with Microsoft and try to replace legitimate
competition with endless legal harassment.

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