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Here are some things that MicrosoftCorporation have done to frustrate competitors. Remember - DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run.

Website discriminates against browser

Microsoft's Knowledge Database (and maybe other parts of their vast web site) renders badly with "other" browsers, for example with overlapping text so that parts are unreadable. It isn't just carefully crafted code that gets handled differently - their webserver sends back different data depending on how your browser identifies itself

$ URL="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;314458" $ IE_UA="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; YComp 5.0.2.6)" $ OTHER_UA="Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.2 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020524" $ wget --user-agent=$IE_UA --output-document=ie.html $URL $ wget --user-agent=$OTHER_UA --output-document=not_ie.html $URL $ ls -l

  • rw-r--r-- 1 jrm21 ugrad 28923 Nov 25 16:34 ie.html
  • rw-r--r-- 1 jrm21 ugrad 26701 Nov 25 16:34 not_ie.html
One difference is that ie.html includes
<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='/common/css/GN/en-us/standard/default.css' > <link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='/common/css/GN/en-us/standard/KBArticleV2.css' > <link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='/common/css/GN/en-us/standard/webparts.cs' >

compared to

<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='/common/css/GN/en-us/down-other/default.css' > <link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='/common/css/GN/en-us/down-other/KBArticleV2.css' > <link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='/common/css/GN/en-us/down-other/webparts.css' >

Read-only Changes to Windows Registry

The HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE part of the registry is not writable by users without "admin" rights on Windows 2000 (and presumably XP). This breaks lots of software that stored program settings in here, meaning they either won't install, or won't run. Netscape 4.7 has (had?) this problem. To be fair, this might not have been done for the purpose of breaking software.

lots of stories about service packs breaking common applications?