The thread on BBC News made me laugh. [Quote] The case dates back to 2007 when Opera - a Norwegian web-browser maker - complained Microsoft was stifling competition on PCs by bundling Internet Explorer with its operating system. [/Quote] Stiffling competition by providing their own browser? Well how are users supposed to browse the internet which is the whole point of a PC or download other browsers?

By giving them a choice to start with. It says so in the first post.

Stiffling competition by providing their own browser? Well how are users supposed to browse the internet which is the whole point of a PC or download other browsers?

Being a linux user, I find the joke "the only thing IE is good for is to download another browser" to be extra amusing since it seems to be a Windows specific problem (I think Mac users can get other browsers in the app store). MS could offer a tool to let users download what they want. Anyways how exactly do they come up with these numbers for these anticompetitive lawsuits?

The thread on BBC News made me laugh. Stifling competition by providing their own browser? Well how are users supposed to browse the internet which is the whole point of a PC or download other browsers?

i concur! it's not hard to remove IE after you choose another if you want to, maybe to deal with the EU regulators they should have shipped it with no browser. Sorry, you can't get on the internet because of some crazy fairness policies. OVER REGULATION KILLS INVENTION. oh, and over here (US) we have are own insane little regulator, Mayor Bloomberg, who now wants to ban earbud headphones. He would do great over in the EU

i don't understand why they have to be given a choice. this is retarded. did people go after the iphone for only offering safari by default? like wat?

i concur! it's not hard to remove IE after you choose another if you want to, maybe to deal with the EU regulators they should have shipped it with no browser. Sorry, you can't get on the internet because of some crazy fairness policies. OVER REGULATION KILLS INVENTION. oh, and over here (US) we have are own insane little regulator, Mayor Bloomberg, who now wants to ban earbud headphones. He would do great over in the EU

Easy. Have installers for more than one browser, of the versions available at the time of release.

The whole thing is retarded. Windows is a microsoft OS, its THEIR intellectual property, so why should they be forced to offer Browsers from competitors out of the box on THEIR OS? I don't see anyone out there forcing software developers to make programs compatible with more than one brand of OS.

OSX ships with Safari and UBUNTU with Firefox as default, how is that different than shipping Windows with IE? There are installers available to replace any of these, and it's not much different to search and install them via IE than how the other OS's offer the choice. Windows 8 even shows the choice right from the beginning, so should EU start a to give Apple, all Linux distributions and Android a fine for hiding the choice?

The whole thing is retarded. Windows is a microsoft OS, its THEIR intellectual property, so why should they be forced to offer Browsers from competitors out of the box on THEIR OS? I don't see anyone out there forcing software developers to make programs compatible with more than one brand of OS.

Because when you're on the verge of being a monopoly, it means decisions (like making IE the only option to start with) are anticompetitive. How would you feel if you made an amazing web browser better than IE in every way imagineable and you got little to no attention because people just go with the first thing they see, which in Windows' case is IE? Bad competition means lack of innovation, and lack of innovation means you're going to be stuck with the same broken products for years. This is why AMD dropping out of the CPU market is a big deal, because Intel's prices will skyrocket and without competition they won't try very hard to push the limits. However, AMD is a prime example of how anticompetition can destroy a company.

By giving them a choice to start with. It says so in the first post.

Yup, but Windows 7 doesn't have an app store though, Windows 8 does.

The whole thing is retarded. Windows is a microsoft OS, its THEIR intellectual property, so why should they be forced to offer Browsers from competitors out of the box on THEIR OS? I don't see anyone out there forcing software developers to make programs compatible with more than one brand of OS.

That's the same thing i thought, even though the first thing i do after a clean install is open IE and download Chrome, then unpin IE from the taskbar. This is not retarded, this is insane and has no sense at all. P.S. The whole competition crap reason is in fact...... total bull**** if you ask me....

Yup, but Windows 7 doesn't have an app store though, Windows 8 does.

See post #7

By giving them a choice to start with. It says so in the first post.

I thought if you buy windows you get calculator and minesweeper and browser as part of OS. Why the **** do i need os throwing me choices of calculators.. oh its browsers(as if that matters)

Easy. Have installers for more than one browser, of the versions available at the time of release.

But that would be a smart thing to do. And we know that doing the smart thing is doing it wrong. 🙄

Because when you're on the verge of being a monopoly, it means decisions (like making IE the only option to start with) are anticompetitive. How would you feel if you made an amazing web browser better than IE in every way imagineable and you got little to no attention because people just go with the first thing they see, which in Windows' case is IE? Bad competition means lack of innovation, and lack of innovation means you're going to be stuck with the same broken products for years. This is why AMD dropping out of the CPU market is a big deal, because Intel's prices will skyrocket and without competition they won't try very hard to push the limits. However, AMD is a prime example of how anticompetition can destroy a company.

I'm sorry but I disagree with almost everything in this post. If Microsoft was still performing bad business practices in order to secure their monopoly, then maybe I'd agree. But they've been losing marketshare for years now. And with the recent shift to Mobile computing, they are competing in an entirely new front where they are actually significantly behind. Further, where do you draw the line with this? You could the say the same thing about someone who writes a calculator app, or a notepad, or media player, or calendar app, or a weather app. How come all these get to be bundled but the browser gets singled out? Sounds to me like the competition in browser land as a much larger say than the little guys who make all the other apps -- which to me means the entire premise isn't about what's good for the user, but what's good for the other companies. As for Intel vs AMD, Intel did play a role with anti-competitiveness but the FTC put a stop to that. Afaic AMD dug it's own grave when it purchased ATI. And Intel has found a new competitor anyway, ARM. Where just like Microsoft they find themselves competing on a completely different field. And if Intel ever does stagnant, the same thing will happen to them that happened to companies like Blackberry. They will get beat. Someone, somewhere will see an opening to start something new and revolutionize the industry. The only time government should step in, is like I said, when the FTC hit Intel in 2009. They were purposely cutting off access to rival chip makers in specific marketplaces. Like if Microsoft were actively preventing firefox and chrome to run, then yeah I agree, hit them with fines. But forcing them to promote competitor software is just nonsense.

I thought if you buy windows you get calculator and minesweeper and browser as part of OS. Why the **** do i need os throwing me choices of calculators.. oh its browsers(as if that matters)

You honestly need to ask this lol? To be able to go online.

You honestly need to ask this lol? To be able to go online.

Last time I checked Internet Explorer gets you online. Least I'm pretty sure it does, it's been a while.

If they knowingly did not comply with the EU requirement then the fine is well deserved.

Last time I checked Internet Explorer gets you online. Least I'm pretty sure it does, it's been a while.

You did see post #1 ?

If they knowingly did not comply with the EU requirement then the fine is well deserved.

Sure, but shouldn't the same rules apply to every company that ships an OS bundled with a web browser?