Yeah how dare they… they should be like those other companies that exist to do something other than make money.

Who’s treating the end consumer like they are fools? The person who says they can take care of themselves or the person who says… no… they need the government to come in and “help” them. I’m sure the EU is trying to do what’s best for the end user… not collect money.

A piece of quote from Wikipedia on the United States v. Microsoft under the section Apeal which reflects my an so many people’s opinion on Microsoft:

Judge Jackson’s response to this was that Microsoft’s conduct itself was the cause of any “perceived bias”; Microsoft executives had “proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. … Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing.”

In my opinion this sums up Microsoft, never mind the good they may have done. The text is a piece from the “Microsoft

Regarding the fees the EU charges MS. MS has cash to burn and I am sure they can use this as some tax write-of or whatever. I also don’t see what they had to loose in the 1st place if they complied to EU regulations. If you break a traffic rule surely you cannot complain about the ticket.

Besides all that, MS has made lots of money out of their scheme of browser & OS integration at the expense of other companies, including US companies.

The matter of presenting people with a choice raises questions (i.e. With the installer or end user)? I am sure my grandmother would ask me which she should choose and why if she happened to come across the choice, i.e. if she were alive! Not knowing their is a choice that can be made will ultimately result in the user (Your Grandmother or whoever) choosing what is immediately available, i.e. Internet Explorer because it comes bundled with every PC.

Also, even in technical circles around here I have seen much ignorence in terms of researching products. Fact is that people are creatures of habit and will always take the easiest road. Not having to download an alternate browser is the easy way out!

In any case, just heard from my MS distributor today that regulations are in the works to prohibit bundling of trial software (Such as MS Office) with Windows! For me that is great news as this is just another way of MS to abuse the end user. Get him/her to use your product for free for 3 months and them slam him/her with the decision to buy your product. Obviously you have not choice unless you want to redo all the work or know how to convert your your data to something else. Sure MS Office does a good job but the schemes Microsoft dreams up to gain market share always astounded me. To tell you the truth, I have had quite a few discussions with MS reps in our city regarding the distasteful tactics I have come across by them, not to mention not supplying customers with cds and the concept of media free kits, something no descent end user will ever understand, not myself for that matter. Another thing is all MS different activation schemes. Effectively this means you don’t buy a product, you lease it. Without activation you are screwed and activation resembles nothing else than having to ask your landlord (Microsoft) for the key to access your own…

We all know that Microsoft allows and expects third party writers, and I was against them in the scandal right after XP’s release that made it impossible to set 3rd party competitive products as defaults. But this goes far beyond that.

Look at Apple and the iPhone. They won’t even let you install another browser on it, which is inconceivable considering its marketshare…much like Windows and the OS market. But Microsoft doesn’t fence you in like that.

To use the Bush/Election analogy is incorrect, IMO. In this connected day and age, if people are ignorant of any one of the numerous competing browsers or search engines or software out there – then they probably should not be made to choose between things they don’t understand at all. You are completely right that IE has less features than Chrome or Firefox, but it’s frequently updated for security reasons and actually according to most recent reports has a better track record of responding to security holes than Mozilla.

If my Grandmother sees a screen of “what browser do you want?” in front of her, she’ll freak out. She’s fine with IE. If she takes the time to research and study the competition, maybe she’ll take the leap (or maybe I’ll just install Firefox for her!) Microsoft is more than fine with that, these days. But they shouldn’t be forced to sell another company’s products as punishment for being the most used.