Three Wise Men

In the early years of internet growth I had the opportunity to work as a web designer. As web designer I designed a web page. Simple not too complicated. And it rocked. Literally. Admired by many. By today’s standards web page was LAME. Totally. But it used an interesting JavaScript. As now I was using Linux at the time and I replaced the default mouse cursor with cool animated Linux penguin. The penguin was fabulous. The animation was interesting. The script was flawless. It did not bother me that the script was not working in IE because at that time netscape ruled the web and Microsoft did not bother to make it work on Linux.

It was time to finally install Windows 7. Released To Manufacturing version. I must admit, I was quite skeptical about this because it seems that I have been cursed in my youth and Microsoft products simply fail with me. No, seriously, I have had so many issues with Windows that even Chuck Norris can’t count all of them, and he counted to infinity, twice. I do hope that you are not affected by the same curse.

So why Windows 7 if nothing works for me like it should? Windows 7 was, and still is praised by a lot of fans. It is even praised by some people that are not, you know, typical fan-boys. I wanted to see what this praise was all about and what is so great on Windows 7. I already had Release Candidate 1 downloaded but I decided to obtain Ready To Manufacture version, they said that it is the shit.

A little while ago I was writing about Open Source Community, Microsoft, Computer industry in general and why open source is doing good. Today I’ll try to tackle latest development in what looks like a third browser war which is being fought in courts instead in the field – the market.

It wasn’t the first time that European Union tried to swing against Microsoft. First battles were fought more than ten years ago in 1997 and Novell complained even before that in 1993.  So, this has been dragging for quite some time now and not so long Microsoft was charged somewhere around US$ 2 billions because of their actions. European Commission (EC) also forced Microsoft in selling two different versions of Windows in EU region – one with Windows Media Player and one without it. Microsoft complied but they put the same price tag on both boxes. The end result was probably some face-palming inside EC, some grinning inside Microsoft and nobody actually buying the stripped down version of Windows.

Now people in EC got smarter and they are trying to outwit Microsoft. They decided that Microsoft should include other browsers in Windows Installation.

Continue reading if you want to know why I think that Microsoft should be sanctioned in some way, but I doubt that this is the correct way.