What Joe said.

Except that MS went after one product that helped put another company on
the map; unless I misunderstood, I don't see how they are taking on MS
with their browser (or was Joe referring to their crying foul). Good for
Netscape that they have the sense to hang on to the ball and run with
it, and not depend on their browser for their future. They should take a
page from MS's book, and leverage that advantage. Whatever they do, let
other vendors hook in to it, to for instance offer a secure e-commerce
standard (or whatever the new and sexy thing to on the web is) using
Netscape's web server or anyone else's, but be the first or best to
offer it.

And while most HP 3000 editors are better than EDITOR, for instance,
much of what MS bundled that covers the same niche as a for-sale
product, does hurt the for sale product's sales. OTOH, I don't know of
anyone selling a plain text editor that does maybe three more things
than Notepad, unless you count shareware.

This makes me think of what came bundled on my handheld PC. Pocket Word
appears to do LESS than WordPad. I don't think that Pocket Excel could
have fewer features and still exchange files with regular Excel, but I
still find it useful. Pocket Internet Explorer has Microosft [sic] on
it's About; oops. The Schedule and Exchange applets are more than
adequate, closer to full functionality; they sync seamlessly, whereas
file exchange is still manual (no briefcase like functionality,
unfortunately). But all of these come bundled with CE, and CE HPCs have
to be hurting Palm Pilot sales. Of course, Palm Pilots come bundled with
hand-writing recognition; is that part of the OS or not? Perhaps
integration into the OS is like competitive advantage: it's only an
advantage until everyone is doing it, then it's part of the cost of
doing business.
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