Originally posted by vraiblonde
Easier to tell me to search Google than to admit you don't know, isn't it?
I'll give you a hand: Netscape. They, after all, are the ones that brought the anti-trust suit against Microsoft. And they were so victimized that they had to sell their company for $4.2 BILLION. I wish Microsoft would come victimize me!!!
But you're also missing the most obvious victim. The users.
The anti-trust case was only the beginning, and it also spurned on the development of other lawsuits against microsoft.
This is an interesting topic for me since windows first came about when I was first getting involved with computers. The beginning of microsoft and the windows software we have become attached to are all a result of microsoft strongarming the competition. Like I said, "victimizing" isn't the world that is often used... And some, such as xerox, were "willing victims", laughing at what their engineers called a "windows" system. They sold it to apple, and with it gave up a few engineers. Then we all know that microsoft jumped all over the apple ideas. Steve Jobs was/is a visionary, but at the time his vision was distorted by power and greed, and a little "old fashion business practices". He honestly felt that working, working, working to put out a good system would be good enough. he didn't consider the competition at the time. He felt his hard work and vision of a "windowing" system would revolutionize the industry. And it did, only it wasn't his solution that ultimately paved the way. And this was just the beginning. Microsoft has strong armed the competition, as well as the consumers, to create the giant you see today. Some of their early licensing issues for DOS were rather interesting. Again, the notion of "willing victims" come into play, where as their license agreement stated that companies that sold computers which had DOS had to pay a royalty to them, even if the system didn't deploy with DOS... And apple was stupid. They actually agreed to what the MS lawyers put forth: that ms would nto use apple code or ideas in windows 1.0. But it said nothing about future releases... And we all know what win95 looked like. Something like this would never happend today. Or would it? This is eerily similar to the notion put forth by microsoft that if you sell a windows based machine, you will have to have IE installed as well.
As a business-minded person, I can admire the ultimate success of microsoft, but you can't admire it without knowing, if only in the back of your mind, just how they got there. Much like politics, business can be dirty and isn't for the faint of heart. Which is why with all the software guys and software companies out there, there is only one Bill Gates and only one Microsoft.
. Bill Gates is powerful and who did he victimize? George Bush is President of the United States - who did he victimize?
