Monopoly

On winterspeak.com there’s more discussion about M$ not releasing IE as standalone program anymore. Very interesting:

When people say that Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop PC operating system market, they’re referring to Win 95, Win 98, Win 2000, and Win XP. But each of these operating systems are actually pretty good substitutes for each other and Microsoft is struggling to get people to upgrade. License 6.0 was their attempt to push businesses to XP and get folks to rent operating systems, thus solving the problem, and I’m not sure how much success they’ve had. Integrating browser upgrades seems to be the plan for the consumer market. The point is that Microsoft’s biggest source of competition is old versions of Microsoft stuff, and they’re doing the best they can to kill that off. While Microsoft may have a monopoly on desktop PC OSes, Windows XP does not.

Via: Bitworking.