[Japo]

Originally Posted by RRS

As with the thread about social networks, please bear with me: I was born during the commie times in Eastern Europe, I had no economy/business class at high school (and when I got to the university we had such "useful" classes such as philosophy), so apparently I'm not ready for the modern world...
...or maybe it's because I think independently?

You think that was different in "capitalist" countries... Funny. It was only different AFTER you got out of the state-mandated educational system, and had to get a job. At (elementary/school) I was taught nothing about economy/BA, of course, but of course we had philosophy and Latin.

1. Why all this craze about Internet browsers ... ?
...
2. Why invest zillions of $ in advertising a supplementary application for your OS that's available for free? Which competes with other browsers, also available for free, like Firefox? Today even Opera has free full version, none of these display, say, ads to generate revenue... so where's the money? Who gets more $ if Firefox takes over the IE - or vice versa?

Hmmm +1 it's complicated, first of all it's about "business models". Nowadays browsers get most income from redirecting to search engines and stuff... However there are other sources of income.

A curious example of business model is Opera. It has more features than any other, and it's ported to many more platforms than any other, without being open sourced. After a foray into legit adware in the 90s, their current business model is that they build a name for themselves making a browser for the PC, where most people will have the chance to learn about their brand--and there's no chance of charging since everyone in the competition is giving their browsers away for free; and they get some money by charging OEMs of platforms such as mobile, Nintendo Wii, ebook readers...

Nobody noticed that Windows also came with pre-installed simple text editor (Write/Wordpad) and that's monopolistic move as well? I don't recall any legal battle about that? How about media player, firewall etc. - there are stand-alone paid products for these functions offered by other companies, why no anti-Microsoft-monopoly shows regarding these?

You're questioning really basic things that everybody accepts as granted, which is good IMO--since I happen to agree with you. This is a political issue. Is it a crime to ship applications with your OS? Then Linus Torvalds should be in jail. Is it liable to become crime but only if it gets a certain market share? IMO the current mainstream opinion about competition is that "defending competition" means punishing success a posteriori, even if this success was earned in free competition.

Originally Posted by Eagle of Fire

The goal of those marketing campaigns is to gain direct monopoly. Once you get that, you can do whatever you want without getting bothered about it.

Right, just like IBM was able to do whatever they wanted after they got their "monopoly"... Until they stopped serving customers as efficiently as their newly appeared competitors in hardware (Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard) and their former insignificant software contractor Microsoft. Then they got kicked out of business and IBM is (almost) no more.