So by now you've no doubt read that a federal judge has ordered that Microsoft be split into two companies. Microsoft's primary defense has been that to do so would stifle innivation and have 'chilling effects' on software innovation, if enacted.

So I went to Yahoo and noticed there's a live web press conference with Bill Gates and I try to watch, only to have the site offer to fetch the needed plug-in (Microsoft Streaming Media Player) and then to find out that Microsoft doesn't make a plug-in for Unix boxes (I'm running Linux). Mind you, they don't tell you this, you discover it when you get just a blank page, and open up the HTML source to find they've written the page with IE-specific DHTML so any browser other than Explorer can't see it at all.

Funny, but it occurs to me that if Windows was made by one company, and streaming media products were made by another, as the ruling proposes, they might actually have a Unix version. Impediment to innovation my ass... Sigh.