Yet another article today. The EU is saying that it’s going to take another approach. Instead of fines, or forcing Microsoft to ship without Internet Explorer, they are going to try to force Microsoft to include other browsers in Windows. This means that most likely Firefox and Opera would ship inside Windows.
The EU is Picking Winners?
Forget for a second that I work for Microsoft and let us just look at this pragmatically. I have talked about this a lot, and I know it’s getting old, but we are very close to a complete reversal of roles and the EU using Microsoft’s supposed monopoly position to decide which browsers do and do not succeed. The concept of product tying, is what the EU is upset about. Windows the platform gives Internet Explorer an unfair advantage in the marketplace. I’ll get off my “who cares and who said business is fair” soap box for a minute and ask a logical question. If the EU chooses which browser would be included, are they not tying themselves?
Does The Customer Get Screwed?
Contrary to popular belief, there are other browsers than Opera and Firefox. Are they going to force Windows to ship with 25 browsers? Is your desktop going to look like circa 1999 Dell with 40 shortcuts on the desktop to different browsers? Is Microsoft going to be required to support these browsers? If so are they going to be compensated for having to support a competitor’s products? I can’t imagine calling Microsoft for a problem, only to be told that I had to call Mozilla for my issue.
Care to know what your support options are for Firefox? You can post something to a bulletin board, you can browse their knowledge base (probably not much help is your browser isn’t working properly) or you can download an IRC client and go into a big chat room and try and find help. I am afraid that to the average user, that isn’t support.
If you want more support than that from Opera, you are going to have to sign up for Premium Support and pay for it. See, that’s the problem with free software, it’s usually extremely poorly supported. Now you are asking Microsoft to take a product from an organization that wants nothing more than to see them fail, with little to no support, and ship it with their product. WHAT!?
Who Really Wins Here?
This whole situation is rife with conflict of interest, my biggest question is this: If they pull this off, is Microsoft allowed to change the default landing page and search engine for those browsers? If not… I mean…why not just force Microsoft to write Google a check. Let’s make it a tidy 20 billion or so.
Think about it for a second, it’s very obvious. The only way that Firefox makes money, is that Google pays them a referral fee for every search initiated through the search box or default home page of Firefox as it ships. That is other than the obvious huge payment they get for making Google’s search engine the default landing page.
Now, last time I checked, Google had a ridiculous advantage on all of the other search engines when it comes to Market Share. In 2007, and it’s increased since then, Google had 65% and the closest competitor was Yahoo with a shade over 20%. Microsoft was about 8.5%, Ask.com had around 3.5% and everyone else made up the rest. That means every other search engine on the internet combined for 3%.
It’s no secret that Yahoo is crumbling from within, and with an already declining market share, is likely to fall out of the running completely unless someone intervenes. The only problem is that they think to highly of their value and seem determined to fall apart than take an offer that isn’t well above actual value.
That leaves Microsoft, struggling to stay in a business that built Google into a multi-billion dollar behemoth seemingly over night. Microsoft is making some moves, most recently with bing.com appearing as the rebranding of live.com, but it’s no secret that being the bundled browser and search engine in Windows is the only thing keeping them at a still declining 8.5%.
So where is the monopoly here? If being in Windows is such a huge advantage, why is Google absolutely dominating this industry?
If the EU succeeds in this change, they will be further cementing one monopoly while trying to thwart another in an industry that they clearly are not the leader in.
The graph above is the one the EU will have you look at. 66% in favor of Internet Explorer for Browser market share. But the numbers that source the revenue don’t back it up. The obvious math would prove that the end users are either savvy enough to, or tricked into switching the default search engine for the operating system 80% of the time!
Google is not beyond striking deals that subtly switch your browser search provider when you install one of dozens of third party applications. Yahoo has pulled the same dirty move. These days any number of applications from little apps to ones as large as Adobe Acrobat.
The point is that shipping with the operating system doesn’t ensure a victory by any means.
The Dodge Ball Analogy
Imagine if you were a kid again, playing dodge ball in PE class. Before the game started, the coach came by and pulled the biggest kid aside and said “You see all of the smaller kids? You aren’t allowed to try to hit those guys.” Then, that same coach goes to all of the smaller kids, gives them two balls each and says, “You see that big kid over there? Everyone aim at him.” Then, to make things extra fair, announces to the class, “Every hit on the big kid counts as two, and every hit on a small kid counts as one half.”
I know, it’s extreme isn’t it? Or is it? And what kind of message does it send? We are already at a place where everyone gets a trophy. Kids are taught that you can get a black belt in a couple years at the age of 10, and that if you want something, all you have to do is keep complaining until you get your way.
The Mythical Monopoly Gauge
The sad truth is in the name of competition, competition is dying. Companies like Apple are benefiting from the restrictions being placed on their competitors by using the same (or worse in many cases) tactics that are the cause for many of these lawsuits. Don’t believe me? iTunes, the only media player that you can really use if you have an iPod or iPhone, default installs QuickTime with iTunes. OS X ships with Safari by default. iTunes tries it’s best to install Safari on your PC over and over, you have to diligently reject it every time there is an update.
These practices would be absolute cause of lawsuit for Microsoft, several of them already have been. These restrictions stifle and suffocate innovation at Microsoft.
So what is the lesson we learn here? It almost seems to me like the lesson is “Don’t get too big.” If you are small enough to avoid a target, then you can lie and cheat like everyone else and it’s ok.
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Really I think the whole Windows without IE is absolutely retarded, and I can give a probably pretty good guess as to why their trying to get it to ship with a different browser rather than no browser….
How would someone to go the websites that you download the browsers from without a web browser?!? while I’m guessing that there’s a way to download them without a web browser, I personally would have no idea how to do it and I’m guessing no ‘average user’ would know how either. So really, MS is doing the other companies a favor in providing the average user a user friendly means to aquire their competators web browser.
So basically, how do you chose which browser Windows should come with? No matter what you chose you’re favoring one company over another, so why not IE? Mac computers come with a browser that I’m pretty sure is made by the same company as the computer and the OS.
Imagine what would happen if MS decided that they only want you to install Windows on PC’s made my Microsoft…. In my opinion, nobody can ever say that Apple has better business practices or ethics than Microsoft. Microsoft allows you to install their OS no matter what company or person made made the parts / built the computer. This has encouraged the creation of probably even billions of jobs around the entire world. Really, does anyone even know how many companies in the world make parts for PC’s or build PC’s and how many people they employ? Then there’s all the companies that sell the parts…. Apple has encouraged the creation of how many jobs making or selling hardware outside Apple?
Then there’s the stupid debate that Macs run better than Windows PC’s…. really, think about it…. how many different hardware vendors does Mac have to make their software compatible with? I bet that if Windows was limited to running on only one hardware vendors products, it would run as close to perfectly (if not absolutely flawless / perfect) as possible.
Sorry, these topics really piss me off… People are stupid and greedy, there’s no way to put it really.