ie, effectively ending this organizations investigation. However, these two issues were deemed to be so important, that the Department of Justice (DOJ) picked up where the Federal Trade Commission left off (Cook). The government eventually annoyed Microsoft into signing an agreement that discontinued Per-Processor licenses. The Internet service issue was resolved by allowing the manufacturers to preload access to any service that they wanted. While this agreement did keep Microsoft from swallowing up the ISP market, it did little to loosen the giant’s iron grip on the preloaded OSS market. It didn’t ease the stranglehold enough though.1995, the year Windows 95 was released, saw Microsoft go from just being top dog to being as invincible as Achilles. The overwhelming advertising campaign was capped with the Rolling Stones “Start Me Up.” IBM was so dismayed that they pulled the funding for widespread promotion of their operating system, OS2, relegating it to a strictly business platform. In four days, over one million copies were sold; that is ten times faster than MS-DOS (Mardesich). The money flooded into Bill Gates’ coffers, and there was no end to the river of cash. A year after the windfall of ’95, Microsoft was still abiding by the consent decree. At some point in the past however, the “Powers That B(ill Gates)” at Microsoft had decided that if he could not control how you connect with the Internet, then he would control how you view it. So, the bad boys of Redmond, Washington bundled Internet Explorer 4.0 (IE) with Windows 95, and touched off a war with Netscape. The primary product of Netscape is an Internet browser called Navigator, so the company filed a formal complaint with the DOJ (Forbes). They alleged that Microsoft was charging OEMs if they load Navigator onto pcs with Windows. The other factor aggravating them was that the Microsoft was offering IE for free. Soon after the p...
