Re: Microsoft to limit capabilities of cheap laptops

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Walden H. Leverich wrote:
> What part of it do you feel should fall under anti-trust,
> or other, "legal" rememdies?

I don't know the law well enough to answer that.  So I'll fall back on 
the generalization that monopolies are bad for consumers, and harmful to 
innovation.

The innovation in ultra low cost PC's was pioneered by people outside 
Microsoft, and actually incongruent with Microsoft's historical mode of 
creating software that pushed the limits of personal computers, while 
Linux has historically been in-step with scaled-back devices.

We've seen this before.  Browser and Web technologies pioneered by 
Netscape in the mid 90's were also innovations incongruent with 
Microsoft's position as a PC software vendor.  Browsers transfered 
computing back to servers.  Microsoft responded by killing Netscape, and 
has since been extending it's monopoly from PC's to servers.

Windows XP Home edition is arguably not a good fit for ultra low cost 
PC's from a technical perspective.  Name recognition will propel it's 
use, but the fact that it's not a good fit for scaled-back devices will 
stifle this emerging market, and buy Microsoft time to come up with an 
OS geared toward scaled-back devices.

It's business.  But not fair to the original innovators.

--
Nathan M. Andelin