Harsh J

Check this news piece:

Opera files EU antitrust suit against Micrsoft

Opera Software has filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft in the European Union, accusing it of stifling competition by tying its Internet Explorer Web browser to Windows, the Norwegian company said Thursday.

The complaint, which was filed with the European Commission on Wednesday, says Microsoft is abusing its dominant position in the desktop PC market by offering only Internet Explorer as a standard part of Windows, and hindering interoperability by not following accepted standards with IE.

Opera is asking the Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, to force Microsoft to unbundle IE from Windows, or include other browsers as a standard part of its operating system. It also wants it to require Microsoft to adhere to industry standards with its Web browser.

The issue of standards is seen as important because if all Web browsers do not use the same standards, Web site developers are likely to design their Web sites to work with the most widely-used browser, which is Internet Explorer. That gives people a disincentive to use other browsers.

Microsoft’s spokesman in Brussels did not immediately have a comment on the lawsuit. The company has argued in the past that consumers benefit from its tight integration of IE and Windows.

Opera said it filed the complaint on behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them.

PC World

Have the Opera people gone out of their minds? I’m not an Opera hater. I do detest Internet Explorer (IE) but asking an OS to omit out the browser from its bundle is something no one would approve. And what about Apple’s OS X? They too bundle Safari together with it, lets sue them too!

My point is, an OS without a browser in it is suicide. No one would want that to happen. In fact people would love to use the bundled IE on-install than to be presented with a dozen of browsers to choose from.

This is no way to improve a browser’s rank in the market, its pure stupidity. Instead, do something the more smoother way like advertise it on TV a few times, or a board, stickers, and stuff like what the community driven Mozilla Firefox does. That is slow, but it works. This is just screaming out for attention like a 13 year old kid!

But there’s no telling I won’t be happy to see IE in flames. But that would be another blog post, if it happens.

When you start seeing things like these, for over 24 hours.

Biggest BSOD of all Time? In Toronto.

Microsoft has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the operators of “Longhorn Reloaded,” a project that was dedicated to reviving an earlier beta of Windows Vista from before the company removed certain features, such as WinFS. The operator of the site has since posted a message saying that he had removed the download link, and this was followed up by a statement from Jean-Marie Houvenaghel??”the founder of the web site Joejoe.org and supervisor of the Longhorn Reloaded project??”that the project was officially discontinued.

Via

Microsoft must’ve just found out that the amount of people driving their cars all the way to Redmond, in order to file complaints on their new OS – Windows Vista for was growing too huge to handle .. and park.

So, in order to show their customer that they really really care about their concerns, they’ve started digging out a huge space to provide parking to 5000 such people, underground (Yeah, so they can trap them inside).

Here’s more on the super massive trapdoor which Microsoft’s constructing:

Microsoft is digging for a solution to the parking crunch on its growing Redmond campus.

The software giant is excavating a giant pit for an underground parking garage with the capacity for some 5,000 vehicles. It will cover the equivalent of six downtown city blocks and go four stories deep. The underground garage, on the west side of Highway 520 near the Northeast 40th Street exit, is scheduled to be completed by mid-2008. In 2006, the company announced a three-year plan to expand the campus by about one-third, or 3.1 million square feet, at a cost of roughly $1.3 billion.

Microsoft Garage

Plus, a gloat extract from the same:

The new garage “will go a long way to helping out with that crunch that we feel,” Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos said. “You’re going to see a net gain here of quite a few thousand spaces.”

“When this is done, I think people will look to that area as the center of campus,” Gellos said. “It’s being designed and built that way,” with open space, a plaza, and other architectural and artistic touches planned to make the area pedestrian friendly.

Lou Gellos

Psst .. There’s an even more sinister part in this. Inside information tells me that they will definitely have an ‘emergency trapdoor system in case of .. emergency‘ to trap down the parked people inside and deploy Microsoft Surface units to brainwash them into buying it. A nice formula of selling more on people’s terrified moods.