Re: Don't bash Microsoft (was A89: Sim City 68k)
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Re: Don't bash Microsoft (was A89: Sim City 68k)
There is a difference, however. Microsoft is evil and AOL
is (as close as can be expected for a big corporation)
good. Microsoft is anti-consumer and AOL is pro-
consumer. Microsoft will happily do things that
seriously damage the economy and the general public
for a few dollars, while AOL is looking after the brisk
and proper development of the Internet and taking huge
losses for it.
Microsoft's business practice is built on forcibly limiting
competition and artificially controlling prices, as well
as tricking companies and consumers out of rights.
"You only have one option, and that's us." They were
taking consumer rights away when they stopped
giving out the media, they're continuing it with pay-per-
reinstall, and they're rapidly moving toward operating
system rental. And remember what MS did to Java?
Horrid.
AOL, on the other hand, is a strong supporter of open-
source. They are the proud owners of Netscape and
mozilla (your only true alternative to MSIE). They
opened up the AIM network to end-users (a free
service that costs a huge amount to service and has
basically no revenue, save a tiny bit from the new
AOL users recruited from the ads in AOL's AIM client)
until MS ruined it for us all and decided to take
advantage of it and siphon off AIM's users, as well as
placing their user load on AOL-owned servers without
payment or even notification!
AOL got a bad wrap for the busy-signal problems
a few years back. Keep in mind, they attained this
problem by underestimating the incredible load that
would result from their conversion to unlimited-rate
billing. Think of the positive impact that move had
on the Internet though. What if the majority of ISP's
still charged by the hour? The net wouldn't be such
an active place. It's growth would be stunted by
years. AOL owns such popular applications as ICQ,
Winamp, and Netscape. Those programs aren't
perfect, but I don't see them getting any worse! And
how much does it cost you to use them? Now let's
compare to what happened when MS bought
hotmail.
AOL EARNED their monopoly and is artificially
inflating their price to $0.00US (and eating the losses).
Microsoft STOLE theirs, first from witless giants (like
Xerox), then from small startups trying to compete,
and last from us, the end-users (by not giving us what
we bought). Their artificially inflated price? More than
you paid for your CPU.
AOL is Microsoft's only worthy corporate competitor
(Microsoft's only worthy non-corporate competitor
being linux, attacking from the opposite side). AOL
is the White Knight. And don't you forget it.
In a message dated 10/1/00 1:05:07 AM US Mountain Standard Time,
rosyna@earthlink.net writes:
> Yeah, same thing can be said about AOL.
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