M$'s major objection to any attempt to address its strong handed business tactics is that somehow this would undermine M$'s ability to innovate, thus hurting the general public. However, M$ has never innovated anything. The M$ empire has been built on the bones of the true innovators.

Just about every product that M$ has introduced had root outside M$. Some products it purchased like Sybase which it developed into MSSQL. It also purchased FoxPro, both for its Rushmore optimization, but more importantly as a tool to go head to head with Borland Dbase. The MS DOS operating system strongly resembles its UNIX predecessor. I not sure what the roots of M$ C and C++ are, but I suspect that M$ was not the true innovator of it. Most recently M$ has developed C# and the Dot NET framework to combat SUN's Java success.

M$ really stifles innovation buy robbing it from the true inventor. Whenever anyone develops a killer application, and the inventor is recognized by the market place with financial rewards, M$ takes notice. Base on M$’s MO I can say that M$ would begin a project to build a competing application. Using its vast resources, it would rapidly introduce a competing clone product. M$ has a marketing department that could sale crushed ice to the Eskimos in the middle of a once every hundred-year blizzard. It would use it marketing team to put the true innovator into obscurity.

Why would I want to build a software product that would become tremendously successful when I know M$ would simple take it away from me as soon as it caught M$ attention. M$ is like a jealous God in the software industry, and their should be no other Gods before it.

Well, I've said my piece.