Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
So, your right, no one is forcing Astak to make a book reader. But, they want to support multiple formats including Mobi and Mobi is the ONLY place you can get Mobi support Amazon is kind of "forcing" Astak to not install competing format's readers. Seem very much the same to me... I'm not sure why you see it differently.
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Well, Amazon is certainly trying to get Astak not to support other formats, on that we agree.
I think I don't so much see it differently as I was
looking at it from a different perspective: I was looking at it from a
legal perspective, rather than a business perspective. Naturally that would lead me to different conclusions -- apples and oranges, you know.
That being said, I
do see a difference between "having no other available/practical option" and "being coerced into choosing a particular option by some outside agency," but it's an abstract difference. If there's just no other option (such as Dell going with Windows because there wasn't really another viable OS) then there's no forcing involved, only a very limited set of choices, simply not doing whatever it is being one of them.
In the case of MicroSoft making their sale of the OS to Dell conditional on what
else Dell puts on the machine, yeah, that was, at minimum MicroSoft using its position to control (force) Dell to behave in a particular way.
That definitely falls under my definition of obnoxious, possibly unethical, depending on the details (i.e. was it a "we won't sell to you unless ...." or was it a "we'll give you a discount if ...."), but I don't really see that it is or should be illegal. Dell could tell them to go sit and spin and sell their PCs without an OS at all, but that
would have hurt their sales. Obviously it was a very unattractive choice, but it was still a choice.
Further, I totally agree that MicroSoft was being extraordinarily bone-headed about the not loading apps that compete with stuff they didn't
sell in the first place. New depths of bone-headedness, that.
