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Google doesn't have monopoly power in the office or e-mail hosting markets, so nothing they do with their apps product can be an abuse of monopoly power. You don't have to play by different rules until you have that power, not while you're aspiring to it. They're not pushing #1 in the browser market either for that matter. Chrome is running on around 1 in 3 devices, and has been losing share to Internet Explorer the past few months.

http://www.w3counter.com/trends

http://gs.statcounter.com/

The links you posted literally have Chrome as #1.

Being in position #1 doesn't make a monopoly.

Google is doing the world a big favor with this, forcing people to upgrade to new browsers and defragmenting the web as a whole... not to mention making life a hell of alot easier for all us web developers. Microsoft can just make their browser autoupdate like everyone else is doing.

But if they don't, ironically, google may be helping microsoft by encouraging users to upgrade their PC.

And there's no sign that MS will ship new browsers to old platforms.

Of course, users can also simple adopt a modern browser, rather than updating their system. Additionally, if Microsoft doesn't support modern browsers for old operating systems this may deteriorate the Windows experience, which may lead to desktop/laptop conversions to Ubuntu.

XP has 6 months life left, after that I suspect most 'enterprise' web app developers will drop support for IE9, I know we certainly will be.

Do you mean you'll drop support for IE8? XP never supported IE9 as far as I know.

Sorry, yes. I am going mad! A long day in front of the screen.

I was hoping you'd come up with some reasonable explanation why it would be ok to drop support for IE9 as well ;)

I think (hope) most people are making those decisions based on actual analytics data and customer needs versus maintenance cost. I still get a fair bit of IE7 traffic, and there hasn't been a "good" reason to run that for quite a while.

I'd love to be able to stop supporting IE 8, the gap between 8 and 9 is almost as big a jump as 6 to 7, but I don't see that happening until Windows 7 support is no longer offered. Windows 7 came with IE 8 preinstalled and no automatic updates from that to higher versions. People are still buying Windows 7 machines.

Dropping IE 9 support isn't even on the horizon for me.

N.B. The company I work for sells to US k-12 schools.

Windows 7 automatic updates include Internet Explorer updates by default: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/gg615599.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/jj898508.aspx

IE9 was optional (users were presented with a dialog and they could decline installing it), while IE10 was automatic, no questions asked.

Alas, numbers of browser share say that this process is not working as smooth as MS would hope.

I think the thing is that there is forgotten and hated windows vista, that can update only to IE9, thus leaving it as smallest common denominator after XP end of life.

I'm very happy that at DHS CBP, I don't have to support IE<10 anymore as of a short while ago. It's announcements like these from major names in the industry that help us convince IT folks in the fed to drop support for the old and busted and upgrade to the new hotness...

Still have to have stuff working for IE 7 and below (<0.7%) though pretty degraded. But for us IE8 is still at 8%, only losing to IE10 with 11%. At least FF has more than IE (39% to 24%)

Same here, IE8 accounts for ~10% of our audience.

IE is 58% of the global desktop market, so monopoly rules would not apply.

Google similarly locks out old versions of Chrome and Firefox as well due to not supporting modern CSS3/HTML5/JS standards.

Remember, Google isn't locking IE out at all. Both IE10 and IE11 will continue to be supported. Google's stated policy is to support the current and prior major release of all supported browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari). Microsoft itself has a similar policy of only supporting the relatively modern versions in their online Office suite. They don't support IE8 but do support IE9. That means Windows XP users can't use IE to access Microsoft's online office suite.

> I wonder if Google will ever end up in legal trouble for such a policy.

Why would they? On what basis? Also, even Microsoft doesn't want anyone to support old versions of IE. Microsoft wants to sell Windows licenses, remember?

This market if office software, and web enabled applications. Microsoft most certainly are the closest to a monopoly in office software, how many companies buy Word simply to open files sent to them?

Well hopefully zero, since Microsoft gives away free software to view Word docs (plus other apps for Excel and PPT): http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4

In practice, I'm sure lots of copies are sold for the reason you stated.

The problem with IE9 was released two years ago, it's last update was more than a year ago and I don't think it will get any more updates that are not security updates (I don't have time to look now but the updates it got were probably just security updates).

> I wonder if Google will ever end up in legal trouble for such a policy.

I don't think so. It's not like they're banning IE9- users from accessing their services. It's just that the content will probably look weird to them.

> if there is any attempt to specifically lock out older competing browsers

If its not current, I'm not sure that it is "competing" in the sense that would normally be relevant in antitrust/competition law.

And that would very quickly end up with the question of whether all this isn't greatly Microsoft's doing by dropping IE support for older versions of Windows.