Recently Microsoft paid for television commercials for public service announcements. In the commercial Bill Gates discusses how Microsoft innovates and does its best to produce good software. In the commercial, Bill doesn't directly refer to the Department of Justice trial, but its obvious to most people that the commercial is to try to gain public support for Microsoft. Well, it doesn't seem to be working. Now, it seems that everyone is turning away from Microsoft and the break-up talks are stronger than ever now. Dell Computer even offers Linux now as an choice for operating system for most of its productlineup. Bill Gates seems to avoid the main issue by talking about Microsoft innovating. Innovating is not the issue for the trial, it has to do with a monopoly using its power to sustain its monopoly by making it difficult for competitors to compete. Ever since the beginning, Microsoft has been very competitve and long-term goal oriented. Before Microsoft had a monopoly for the PC operating system, they had to compete with another company with a superior product. Microsoft charged less for its software and eventually won. Then after a while it gave PC makers very good deals on its software to install its operating system on every computer. As competing companies developed, Microsoft did its best to eliminate them. The most notable was Netscape. Netscapes browser was originally free, but after it started to become competive they started selling it. Microsoft then steped in, and gave their browser away for free and probably figured that Netscape would eventually run out of money and they would win. The bundling of sofware is yet another way that Microsoft can get rid of competitors. So, it has used its operating system, to bundle the browser with the software. It is essentially the same thing as giving it away for free except that they made it even easier so that the user wouldn't have to download it. The things Microsoft has done would be more obvious if it were a company such as Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart moved into a new area and sold their products at a loss, many of the competitors would fail and Wal-Mart could raise prices after competitors were gone. This is similiar to what Microsoft has done. So, most people aren't going to have sympathy for Microsoft because consumers are paying more for software because Microsoft has gotten rid of alot of competitors.
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