Microsoft could owe billions in another antitrust battle (EU Browser Choice) | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft could owe billions in another antitrust battle (EU Browser Choice)

money.cnn.com

13 pointschaud8 comments

Wow, that 'choice screen' requirement is ridiculously lame. Why not just start forcing Microsoft to show a pop-up when the OS boots letting the user know that they could be running a Mac, or Linux? It seems like the EU never gets tired of trying to stick it to Microsoft. I hope they continue to defy them on this.

what could they possibly hope to gain by defying the EU?

they can't just ignore the law in a country they are operating in, especially when it's the world's biggest economy, which could just seize the assets owed without issue.

Likely the selection dialog was bootstrapped into new Windows Activation, whereas the Service Pack upgraded existing IE components; which are present on the system regardless of which program is registered to handle hyper links.

Overall, I am wondering why the EU is picking on HTTP/HTML support alone and not requiring Microsoft to offer choices on alternate desktop shells, file systems, etc...

you'd find it pretty difficult to demonstrate that by abusing their monopoly in the desktop shell market they caused harm in another; it was pretty easy to demonstrate for browsers.

There are alternate shells available (and were in the past as well, like GEM) and it seems that Microsoft's Windows domination with its default shell is both demonstrable and a direct result of their bundling the shell with the "OS" (there was a time the two were separate, back in Windows 3.1 and earlier days). Heck, when they bundled a TCP/IP stack in Windows 95 it pretty much spelled the end for Trumpet Winsock.

How does something like this happen? How can Microsoft not be on top of this?

There really was nothing for them to gain by removing this dialog so I don't think it was done with profit in mind. Their own browser is now a pretty compliant browser so it doesn't slow down web adoption.

I can't really believe it was dropped by accident as all jokes aside, very few companies test their software as thoroughly as Microsoft.

And yet, nobody complains when cars come bundled with tires and steering wheels.

Could be argued that MSFT's "evil empire" thought that they could get away with this as they're locked in brutal combat with Google.

But watching MSFT fragment themselves endlessly over the last two-decades, I Think this is all about "focus".

Every successful entrepreneur talks about "focus" and not being pulled in a million directions, mastering your domain and relentlessly pursuing it.

There are only so many great leaders in an organization that can manage these types of "obvious" potential failures, and corporate memory is notoriously terrible as teams and employees turn over.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com