A survey from Scripting.com -
Is Gates Lying?. The results, as of the time that I voted, were in the middle - either "he is lying" or "he is misleading". There were no votes saying he was telling the truth, and no votes saying he had no real clue.
It's an interesting issue. The concept of an operating system has changed over the years, and not just on the desktop. Integrating technologies has long been a piece of the game. IBM's OS/400 has always had their DB2 database fully integrated into the OS.
Microsoft has gone through great lengths to integrate explorer technologies into the operating system. Windows XP makes this quite obvious - everything looks like a web page. IE's DHTML has become another way to make user interfaces in Windows, although the DHTML generated and used looks nothing like most HTML found on the web. But, it's there. And it's in there
deeep. I really doubt that Microsoft could remove this code from Windows very easily.
That said, could they remove IE easily? Maybe. At its most basic, IE is just a shell over all of these core libraries now. But IE and the file system explorer have been increasingly coupled together.
Fair or unfair? I don't have the experience to say. I'm a long time Mac user and haven't been involved in these games. The IE situation on the Mac is that IE is the default shipping browser, but it's just an application. There are some shared HTML libraries, but I think Office and Outlook Express are the only things that use them. I don't know whether deleting
Internet Explorer.app would cause Entourage to throw a fit if it had to render an HTML message or not. I imagine there are some shared libraries around, but they're little used outside of Microsoft apps. I think Apple uses its own HTML engine for the (incredibly slow) Apple Help Viewer.
But Microsoft's whole "can't make Windows modular" argument is a piece of shit. Windows is almost all DLL's and COM components these days. Granted, there are a lot of interdependencies among all of those components, but if COM's been doing its job, in theory one
could replace all of the IE/DHTML components and libraries with wrappers around Mozilla libraries. But, I imagine it would be an insane amount of work. And I highly doubt Microsoft would really let people replace those libraries any more than they would let them replace the core window management routines.
So, I think gates is being misleading. Microsoft
could add an API to let people replace these core components. But I do think it would break Windows today if the code was just removed abruptly.
I also think it was damn smart of Microsoft to do what they did with IE. Fair? Probably not. But business-wise, it was very smart.
I also think it's ridiculous when Microsoft said "fine, put your own icon in the startup screen", and then whined when AOL made a pact with someone to feature AOL instead of MSN. Microsoft's whine was about "the user should have a choice to go with MSN, and if AOL's featured, we should be too!".
Uhhh....
Both sides of this stupid argument can be absolute idiots sometimes. This
Salon Article by Megan McArdle talks about the stupidity of Netscape's claims in the current lawsuit. It doesn't say that Microsoft wasn't a bully, but just that Netscape's claims don't hold water (or, if they do hold water, could be just as damaging towards AOL).