MA> including pressure from Washington.  I really don't know but if
 MA> Microsoft wants to give away something someone else wants to sell,
 MA> hey, what the heck. I changed over from Netscape a couple of months
JB>But doing it for the sole reason of killing the competitor isn't a prob
 
     That's why it's called competition.  If Microsoft has an inferior
product that people reject, even a free product will not overcome the
shortcommings.  If the product meets people's needs then it will be
accepted.  While a free product may grant market dominance to
Microsoft, much as the dominance MS enkoys in the operating systems
market, that does not define a monolopy.  A monolopy is complete
control of the market not dominance.
      If Microsoft slips, begins over charging for it's product,
sacrifices quality, or falls behind technologically, there will always
be those waiting in the wings to snatch market share.  The object of
all of this is to give the consumer the best possible product for the
lowest possible price and beat out competitors thereby selling more
goods and making the most money possible.  The vendor benifits and,
most of all, the consumer benifits.  Ultimately it is all the consumers
choice anyway.
  
      What we are seeing now is manipulation of the market by
government.  Losers are approaching the government and asking it to
use force to override consumer choice.
      Now, at the behest of government, Microsoft has rereleased it's
first Windows 95 version without Explorer. The reaction?  Noone wants
it.  Why pay the same for a less functional operating system.
      Next govedrnment will demand the inferior product be installed on
a set percentage of machines manufacturered.  The result of that will
be that consumers will refuse to buy the machines with the inferior
abilities.
      The government will decide Microsoft is playing games and take it
over to correct the disparities between the two operating systems.  The
result of that will be a totally inferior product noone wants and we
will loose the superior product in the process.
     Finally, the government seeing that noone wishes to buy it's
product, will make it illegal for the competitiors making a better
product, the same ones who appealed to the government for help in the
first place, to compete at all with the government product and force
them out of the market entirely.
     In the end, this path will lead to a government produced, or at
the very least, heavily regulated operating system that noone wants but
everyone is forced to use.  Is this relaly where we want to go? 
 
                                          /\/\ike
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