[beagle3]

Every single case is different, but with with Microsoft it was corporate policy to do so - "Embrace, Extend, (Extinguish)", and it was executed again (MS-DOS vs. DR-DOS) and again (IE and Frontweb) and again.

The old saying was "Windows is not done until Lotus won't run", and the DR-DOS case shows it might not have been an exaggeration

[youngtaff]

MS spent huge amounts to time and money making sure lots of programs with oddities and bugs worked successfully on Win XP - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

[beagle3]

So? That's irrelevant to the discussion.

Google/Chrome also works hard to support "what's already out there", which is what you mention, but what we're discussing now is building on your supposedly-open-but-really-proprietary platform _against_ other players, whether that's policy or coincidental with constraints.

Microsoft spent effort making sure Windows itself WON'T run on DR DOS before that. They constantly ignored web standards after they won the browser wars (conveniently working well with Microsoft tools that produced non-standard markup, though) ... up until the moment they lost them again, at which point they started to pay attention to standards again.

With their last few releases, Google seems to be adopting this Microsoft style of evil. Some people defend that, and some don't.