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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.

Email Formatting

Outlook and Outlook Express do lots of little things that make messages look funny on non-Outlook email clients.

  • If "Rich Text format" is turned on for outgoing email messages, instead of plain RTF, it is wrapped in a proprietary binary format and given a mime type of "application/ms-tnef". This format can hold attachments so it's possible that it "swallows" a .DOC attachment so you can't even save the file...
  • Putting funny things in the content. Eg - look at the first word in the plain text part

    ... X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2911.0) X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 . This is a multi-part message in MIME format. . ------=_!NextPart?_000_0069_01C1CE83.152A0EC0 Content-Type: text/plain;

    charset="iso-8859-1"

    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit .

    MessageHi?,

    when is Hal getting here? ... . ------=_!NextPart?_000_0069_01C1CE83.152A0EC0 Content-Type: text/html;

    charset="iso-8859-1"

    Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable . <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Message</TITLE> <META content=3D"text/html; charset=3Diso-8859-1" = http-equiv=3DContent-Type> <META content=3D"MSHTML 5.00.3103.1000" name=3DGENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=3D#ffffff> <DIV><FONT color=3D#0000ff face=3DArial size=3D2><SPAN=20 class=3D109264301-18032002>Hi,</SPAN></FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT color=3D#0000ff face=3DArial size=3D2><SPAN = class=3D109264301-18032002>when=20 is Hal getting here? ...

  • And another example that presumably looks fine on Outlook but prints 3 leading garbage characters on Netscape

    X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 ... . Content-Type: text/html;

    charset="utf-8"

    Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable . =EF=BB=BF<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD>

lots of stories about service packs breaking common applications?