Microsoft’s shiny new (but not entirely finished) Longhorn operating system is a move to reassert and to extend the company’s weakening control of the desktop, according to Gartner analyst Michael Silver. He claims, effectively, that Microsoft is using the introduction of new technologies in a decidedly old-fashioned and tried and tested way, using APIs and file formats to outflank, isolate and lock out competition.
Recent Windows market share figures do not of course suggest anything like a loss of control – quite the reverse, in fact. But if you consider what Microsoft has lost, in its antitrust actions, as a consequence of the rise of Java and because of the growing visibility and credibility of Linux, you can see what from the company’s point of view are worrying signs. Antitrust has, as Silver says, “disrupted Microsoft’s efforts to bundle its client OS with other applications”. So for example the use of the integration of IE to stop other companies making the browser the platform, although successful, has now run its course, and variations on the theme (e.g. with Media Player, currently a subject of some interest to the European Commission) will prove increasingly difficult.
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