Microsoft - An expensive error

Microsoft failed to comply with a requirement of a legal settlement, so they are obligated to pay the fine. I doubt anyone here has reservations with that point because it's simply an artifact of the rule of law.

However, the reason several of us find this news disturbing is that we found the original judgment disturbing and the fine reminds that the judgment's settlement requirements are still in play even though, with every passing day, they become more anachronistic. A reminder of a slow-moving government interfering with and not understanding technology to the point of actually damaging technology in the long-term.

The market and technological evolution meted justice to Microsoft in a purer form: loss of market share via improved competition.

I am a fan of Mozilla (by which I mean the lineage of Netscape and Mozilla). I had deeply mixed feelings when the US Department of Justice went after Microsoft for attempting to coerce Windows users into also using Internet Explorer. They made it especially easy to use Internet Explorer, sure. They encouraged naive users to think "Internet Explorer" simply was the Internet, sure. But they never once prohibited me from installing Netscape, Mozilla Suite, or Firefox.

Moreover, they never prohibited me from encouraging friends and family to do the same. If those friends and family rejected my recommendation it wasn't because Microsoft was being anti-competitive; it was because at the time Mozilla was genuinely not-so-great. It was my preference but not everyone's. Still, I considered it my duty, in a manner of speaking, to support Mozilla at all costs because Microsoft was evil.

Yes, I considered Microsoft to be an "evil" (using the word in a very lightweight way) actor in the market. I didn't like how Mozilla was being treated. But on the other hand, I don't feel that anything they did should be considered illegal. If I recall, the only thing I found especially distasteful was how difficult they made it to remove the Internet Explorer icon from the Windows desktop. Like "Recycle Bin" and "My Computer," it required a bit more force.

I also didn't like how even after I installed Mozilla, IE would come up in odd places like applications' help files. So I couldn't outright uninstall it. But flipped around, and reviewed with a modern eye, they were incorporating HTML rendering into non-browsing contexts well before most of us decided that, yeah, HTML is probably a decent platform for rendering styled text in a variety of contexts. Might as well embed an HTML rendering control. We just didn't like that it was IE's Trident (or whatever it was called back then). We wanted it to be Gecko, or later Webkit.

I am convinced that Microsoft slowed down and all but paused their browser development effort with IE 6 at least in part thanks to the legal pressures they were facing from the US and EU. I know that had I been at the Microsoft helm, I'd consider the web browser somewhat tainted and would try to focus engineering and sales efforts somewhere else where my organization wasn't feeling as much government heat, deserved or otherwise.

Years later, I think, they decided to test the waters again, slowly at first. Eventually they awakened to the fact that Internet Explorer had been completely eclipsed during that time, and it has taken them years to catch up. Some would argue that IE 10 is only today roughly at feature parity with its competition.

When you and I bad-mouth Internet Explorer 6, I recommend we direct at least a portion of our vitriol at the DOJ and EU. If I am right that Microsoft's seizing up of browser development was motivated even in part by their legal troubles, then the DOJ and EU are partially and indirectly responsible for the IE 6 malaise. Government meddling, I believe, actually made the situation worse for us.

But the EU insists on continuing to meddle, to continue punishing Microsoft even though the rest of the market looks on and laughs.

When people say, "why aren't they going after Apple for iOS?" I hope they are being rhetorical. That would be awful. The DOJ and EU should not go after either organization. When one perceives monopoly, it's important to be as serious and objective as possible: is it possible that the preferred product is actually the best for customers, even if for reasons we don't agree with, such as ease of use? Allow the market to sort itself out. The market is doing really quite well without the meddling--at least among those who have avoided it--so, thank you, but no thank you.

Sometimes the EU regulators seem to have such forward thinking and great ideas. I don't feel this is one of those times. A browser selection screen as a legal requirement, as well as the decision that they have to offer Windows without Media Player installed, seem to me to just be ridiculous requirements levied on Microsoft in an age where these decisions are increasingly irrelevant. There's no browser selection screen required for Windows RT or Windows Phone. Nor is there a requirement for browser selection on OSX, iOS, Linux distros, Android, or ChromeOS (imagine if that were the case...). In fact, the majority of those platforms require you to use the built-in browser, something Microsoft has never done with IE on the desktop. There's always been the choice of what software you want to install, up to the point when mobile devices gained popularity.

What the EU is trying to do is make competition more fair. What they're doing, in effect, seems to be making sure Microsoft has all the disadvantages the legislators can legally throw at them. I worked at a company that did this for employees it wanted to fire, making new requirements that couldn't possibly be met and when the employee failed they were fired for not meeting them. It's obvious the EU wants to fire Microsoft, in an age where competition has never been so fierce (and not due to a browser ballot).

I can't help but be reminded of: http://xkcd.com/1118/ as I read this.

Bundling a browser with an operating system seems much more innocent than the lack of openness in the mobile world.

I'm sure this will go off topic fairly quickly but the fine is for not complying (between 02/2011 and 07/2012) with an order to display a browser selection screen during system setup.

Microsoft may make the best browser but our IT will see to it that it always behaves like IE6.

IE gets a bad rep -- and it is mainly because most of us working for big cos are forced to use the most extremely locked down version of IE at work. These versions are created by IT drones for other drones and their policies are designed to cover their asses during audit. The only purpose of a corporate locked down IE is to serve you intranet pages or access sharepoint. So when a drone like me gets home and fires up his laptop, its always anything but IE.

So now we know why Sinofsky was shown the door after the release of Windows 8. It wasn't a petty power struggle, it was a 3/4 billion dollar fuckup and he was responsible.

The following sentence leaped out at me. The latest version of Internet Explorer is considered to be on a par with its rivals. Really? Considered by whom?

"Although alternative browsers such as [...]"

Oh please. I don't hate any stupid pair of words more than that one. (Emphasis mine.)

It's funny seeing all those browser marketing materials next to each other. Apparently, every single browser is faster than all the others.

So, this might be a stupid question, but I'm curious: Where does the money of the fine actually go? It's just being collected by these EU regulators and sits in their bank accounts?

So on windows I have to manually download another browser... Can someone tell me how I can purchase music from anywhere other than iTunes on my iPod?

>In February 2009 64% of all desktop computers used Internet Explorer, according to data compiled by StatCounter, a web traffic analysis company.Four years on, that share is only 30%

StatCounter measures pageviews, not "desktop computers", so that statement is flat out wrong and extremely misleading.

NetMarketShare measures computers, and IE has around 55% marketshare not 30%.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/

Why do so many people get this wrong?

I've seen countless "bugs" in Internet Explorer and the documentation in their developer knowledge base was always to "upgrade browser" or "use this vbscript snippet" or "use this jscript only solution that would cause errors in non IE browsers".

At some point I got seriously annoyed by them. This fine is a good reminder that there is some justice in this world.