Re: DOJ asked to stop MS monopolization of browser market

On Tue, 11 Nov 1997, Philip Stripling <philip[_at_]civex.com> wrote:
>
> Michael Bradley <michael[_at_]vision-soft.com> wrote:
> >
> > It strikes me there's a tacit agreement that Windows is an OS, but I
> > don't think that it is. It's a windowing program that runs on top of
> > the OS, MS-DOS, just as X Windows and various implementations are
> > windowing programs that run on top of UNIX.
>
> Would you object to calling Windows a graphical user interface? What if
> I call Windows a graphical shell to interface with DOS instead of DOS's
> command line shell?
>
> Assuming your distiinction is correct, what difference results from the
> distinction? Do people run Windows as a stand alone product, as we may
> run Word or Excel? I can see your point that Windows is not DOS, but
> where do I go with that?

Actually, win95 and winNt do not run "on top of" DOS -- there are very significant memory and process management mechanisms which have (among other thigns) replaced DOS.

Phil brings up a good point though and his question I think goes to the core of the "Is it an OS or not" question. Why do we care about whether IE is part of the OS? Do we care about whether or not there are possible replacements for IE (there are)? Do we care about whether the OS looks different from the browser (it doesn't)? Do we care about whether IE handles conventional OS functionality (it doesn't)?

The point being is that the OS/non-OS thread has a bunch of us talking right past each other because each of us is asking/asnwering a different question.

To put it another way, Microsoft has attempted to hijack/reshape the definition of an OS in an effort to avoid DOJ sanctions. In doing so, they've creatd a great deal of confusion among marketers, users, and most notably, lawyers ;-)

So while we sit here arguing about what is an OS and what isn't, I would submit that our back and forth is largely irrelevant. Like many concepts in a highly competitive, quick moving technology market, such a definition is perhaps non-existent -- sort of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of technology buzz-words. By the very process of nailing down a definition (from a legal/market point of view), you end up changing the very definition itself.

Just look what has happened with the word 'online' ...

      -Gabe  

Gabriel Wachob
<gwachob[_at_]aimnet.com> Received on Thu Nov 13 1997 - 06:38:11 GMT