@DZ-Jay
"However, if you then attempt to collude with distributors to prevent any other potentially better widget-maker from even coming to market, then it is a Bad Thing; for you are abusing your monopoly position to restrict trade, and therefore violating anti-trust legislation."
Oh, you mean like Apple and Flash? Or Apple and the Adobe product for building an iPhone app?
"Notice that the inclusion of say, Calculator, Notepad, Minesweeper, Defrag, etc. was never an issue. Nobody cared about what Microsoft included in their own operating system, really. What they cared about was the vibrant competition being brought forth by third-party Web Browsers"
Bad analogy there mate, Calculator, Notepad, who has a product and is on the market competing with MSFT there?
See, MSFT says sell our product, but sell our product. Not yours. Which is fair enough really, *nix comes with Firefox, Apple comes with Safari, MSFT comes with IE. But no, it isn't fair, because as seen, users are lazy. We like FOSS but to hell with installing our own system and troubleshooting ourselves, we want it sold to us. We don't install another browser, we don't switch products. Using something that isn't technology, apparently females when they buy their first tampons, stick with them for life. That's completely unrelated to a computer, yea? Same concept, different product, but definitely not technology.
What's wrong with MSFT is that no-one can compete. People stick with their first product until it f***'s them over, at which point they hate the company and go with another. Same with boy/girl friends.
So the problem is that companies were dying, think iRiver and iPods. I can't go into a store and buy an iRiver mass media portable music player because the only ones that exist nowadays are iPods. iRivers were great products, and I mean great. They had all the features we've begged Apple to introduce into their iPods, but they worked. You didn't need to install a proprietary product to transfer music, you weren't locked into anything. They were reliable, etc. But find me one today? Not at the online store, that's cheating. :P
Or podcasts, great idea. Now find me a university that does a podcast that isn't in .aac. A proprietary product that you need either iTunes or an iPod to play. Which means you need iTunes. And Quicktime installed, or iTunes won't function. Not just videos, it just randomly freezes up.
Lets see, dealt with Flash, music players, formats, sure I'm missing something.. An OS you can only install on certain hardware? Nah, that's not anti-trust. Regardless that the platform is increasing in popularity.
Change focus to another company instead of Apple to show the different standards in the market, shall we? Hmm.. Google? The search engine that has forced so many others out of business. They own Blogspot, so Geocities died. Bing is around, but that's only because it has MSFT behind it willing to dump $$$ into it to keep it alive. Was a survey done, Yahoo Search got the best results, then Bing, then Google. But no, Google is the big product. Quality isn't in there.
Apple.. Apple is the company who takes an FOSS product, puts a fancy GUI on it and sells it for a few thousand, with a few hundred thrown on top for a few parts from the junk bin to build the actual PC.
"But Apple desktop users can install Flash". That's the argument I keep hearing, but the resellers can't, but MSFT users could install another browser.
Apple can control a platform but MSFT can't? Come on, same standards all round. MSFT have messed with me repeatedly, the version of Vista I bought doesn't work and kept getting transferred between reseller and MSFT, etc. so I have no love for the company. Granted, it could be the reseller, but I hate equally. Keep the same standards for everyone else. People sue MSFT because it's MSFT, because they're freaking huge. They're less controlling than companies like Apple and Google, they're kinder to the FOSS world. Granted, kindness is.. Well, think of them as insane. Friendly at one moment, psychopathically violent trying and trying to murder your family the next. :P But still better than Apple.