| Soleron said: Your conclusion from that graph is that MS doesn't have a monopoly? |
This discussion is talking about consumers upgrading their PCs. Microsoft may have a "monopoly" in that subset of the market, but it's hardly indicative of the general population.
The consumer PC market has been on a downward trend over the past few years, and one of the few growth companies in the market is Apple, offering an alternative product to Microsoft. Mac OS, Android, and iOS are all valid and strong competitors against MS in the consumer market.
Where Microsoft still gets a bulk of their business is through the education and enterprise industries. Where this discussion is irrelevant, anyways, as the end-users rarely get any kind of say over the default browser, as it's usually a policy set by the organisation's IT department. And they certainly don't care about a tickbox that comes up during the upgrade process.
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The truth of the matter is, Microsoft DID have a monopoly in the consumer PC market for many years. And, as a result, progress slowed down for a while. As much as certain users in the thread would like to thank the EU or the US anti-trust cases for bringing down the MS monopoly, that simply doesn't hold up as true when you look at what actually happened. Ultimately, it was all irrelevant as the market just leap-frogged Microsoft's monopoly and created a whole new world where Microsoft is, frankly, unable to compete effectively.
