To me, this is the direct result of tolerating such behavior from Microsoft. The precedents were set with WMP, IE, and all the other stuff they adopted as "native" to the OS, foiling competition. They backed away from making their virus checker part of Windows, but they are still going to produce a stand-alone, and no doubt it will eventually be "bundled". Not surprising that Apple would start absorbing stuff too. If a 'line in the sand' was gonna be drawn, it should have begun back in the Netscape vs. IE years.

I was watching the yearly review of the Supreme Court on c-span last night and they spent some time relating how the court was siding more and more with the defendant in terms of "monopoly" litigation.

This move by Apple will have the same effect that WMPand IE had on their competitors, or a little worse, since WMP and IE have been fraught with security problems, sending many people to competitors out of fear. I think Konfabulator will survive, but the old "I already have a browser, why do I need another one" argument will branch off to yet another family of app.

You really don't expect MS to do this eventually?

i was, for about 10 years, an apple fanatic. my first computer was also the first commerically available system to incorporate a mouse and the windows gui. thanks to a truly robust 1.5 megs of ram, it could multitask (like word processing, spreadsheet and telecommunicate all at the same time)...and stuff printed looking as close to wysiwyg as was possible with dotmatrix. i would have chosen the 2mb harddrive instead of the 5mb because who would ever need that much storage. i got a great deal on it too because apple wasnt able to sell very many lisas for $10k; my first lisa cost me only about $4600.

it didnt faze me at all when i began receiving a series of letters from apple...first inviting me to switch to a mac because thats where the technology was going (while promising to support lisa for several more years)...then a month or so later informing me theyd mispoke about that support stuff so this would be a good time to pay a couple grand for the next generation mac. id found a third-party source for a chip that made lisa think it was a mac and it worked great til system 6 (i think).

fortunately most of the small flock id converted to maccism between 84 and 94 could afford to cast their bread upon the water in cupertino's direction because each new year's version was nowhere near as adaptable and anyone who lagged behind the cutting edge was left in the dust. i would have gladly stuck my fingers into a vat of boiling pcbs before even considering touching a keyboard attached to one of those disgusting pcs...and i took a sort of perverse pride in not having that whole galaxy of software available to the morons who settled for gates' garbage.

the paucity of 3rd parties developing cool things for the mac os wasnt what eventually enticed me into straying off the righteous path (altho the way i wallowed once i built my first ms windows machine was nothing short of scandalous). i have the makings of a pretty decent mac museum within 10' of where im sitting...ranging from the bastard shell of what were once three lisas to a ppc g4 that i so rarely power up i havent felt the need to go from os9.2 to osx and several intermediate breeds between (a plus, an lciii, a performa and some sort of laptop). not one was ever utilized the way it should have been. .

i apologize for taking so long to get to the point..which i just made. the third major reason to not buy apple is having to take a vow of software poverty and live with it. while there are always a few 3rd party developers (as one of the handfuls of original stalwarts faded away, a new one--and usually only one--picked up the slack) for the past 20 years, there have never been enough to support any of the dozens of mac magazines that have withered on the press...nor enough to tempt many of the millions whove endured one half-built version of windows after another without seriously considering buying apple. theyre staying away not because they dont like elegant hardware...they just want it to be able to do something besides look cool.

jobs must have a reason--however ridiculous-- for sabatoging the very people he should be cultivating but i cant imagine what it might be.

as far as gates goes, i can at least say i agree with bakerstreet...altho not happily. check out w2knews (about 3-4 issues back) for a very unsunny take on what its like when ms rolls over on ya just because they can.