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Jereel Hunter on 18 December 2009
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WereKitten said:
Jereel Hunter said:

That may have been true once, but it isn't not. If we go back 5 or 6 years, MS had the market, 95% or so marketshare. They have since lost around 40% of that share. Why? Because products that people liked came out, and they decided to use them. The fact is, the EU isn't trying to keep MS from being a monopoly. MS's marketshare in IE is only about 60% and falling... they are trying to prevent it from even being a market leader. That's an abuse of power.

Maybe I wasn't clear. The monopoly is in the OS market, not in the browser market, but MS always exploited their position of advantage in the OS market to push their other product lines.

Now it's great that Firefox and to a lesser extent Safari, Opera and Chrome have been chipping in the browser space, and in the case of Firefox even became first-tier players. It's a testament to the dismal quality of IE6 that Firefox could make the inroads it did.

But even the most entrenched fans of laissez-faire in economic matters know the dangers of exploitation of a monopolistic position to hamper competition in related fields.

In that sense, I think it could be a pragmatical necessity to push for ways to level the field when it comes to browser choice, as it's arguably the most important piece of software when it comes to most users, and at the same time one that is transparent to most of them.

That's not illegal though. MS is big, rich, and yes, has the vast majority of OS marketshare. But the EU is taking shots at them wherever it can - even if it's not valid. <60% and falling marketshare doesn't show them as an abusive monopoly. They don't own, the market, and they are on pace to continue losing the market. How do you call that abusive? By that logic companies with bigger advertising budgets, or popular brand names could abuse their position of advantage.

In short, if they used one near monopoly to create another, there's a case to be made. When using your influence does nothing other than slow down your rapidly falling marketshare, you're in the clear.