Microsoft Monopoly!

[Typhlosion]

Alright, I wanted to create a different topic in TJP, this one about software and company politics! :D

As is known, Microsoft has a very aggressive way of doing business. Microsoft dominates the market in the OS sector, but... It does a bit more too. Most of the computers in the market already come with Windows pre-installed, as opposed to coming without an OS. Add another hundred bucks to the PC's price. Windows Internet Explorer and Media Player were considered "unfair" to competition as it was already bundled into the computer, discarding the need to look for competing software that wasn't necessarily free at the time. Obviously Internet Explorer was a notorious competitor to Netscape which, at the time, wasn't free. Suits were filed.

And they are doing it again!


When I installed Windows 8.1 I noted a program I hadn't on W7: Reader. A reader that opens PDF files, usually opened by the dominating Adobe PDF. Funny. Since 2007, Word exports documents into PDF files... Coincidence? I think not!

Do you think that Reader and Office will be able to defeat Adobe Reader and Acrobat and become the PDF monopoly?

[TheMatrix]

This comes up with every Microsoft release.

While the bundling was one thing, the underlying issue was that Microsoft allegedly sabotaged other browsers' ability to function.

This new "Reader" thing might actually be an improvement, as we all know that Adobe's Reader sucks -- note however, that I am not saying Microsoft's is any good, but anything is an improvement over Adobe.
The ability to export into PDF from a word processor has existed for at least a decade before Microsoft did likewise; pdfTeX has had it since the early 1990s.