Europe v Microsoft, gloves are on in farce of the century

Stan Beer
Sunday, 14 June 2009 16:17

Opinion and Analysis

It seems that the competition regulator of an unelected government purporting to represent the sovereign nations of Western Europe is waging a socialist war against US technology companies - and Microsoft is the key target. The battle has now come to a head with Microsoft acquiescing to yet another nonsensical demand from the European Commission but still not able to make peace.

The latest nonsense spewing forth from the increasingly farcical EC is about choice in browsers on the upcoming Windows 7.

Apparently, after a complaint from the people running Norway's very own browser pride and joy Opera, the EC demanded that Microsoft should decouple Internet Explorer from Windows 7. That way, you see, we would all find it much easier to make our own choice of browser.

Well Microsoft of course would prefer not to do this as it is already losing browser market share hand over fist to Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and - yes Europe's very own Opera.

I am running Windows Vista (call me a fool if you like) and I used the pre-installed IE browser that came with my OS to download Firefox, the browser I use most of the time. I also have all of the other major browsers installed so that I can test them from time to time.

To even the casual observer of the Internet and web market space, it should be obvious that this is one area where Microsoft for the past five years has been having singularly unspectacular results.

Firefox continues to gain market share in the browser space and, certainly in Europe, may be on a par or even ahead of IE and still steadily gaining share. In the search space, Google has slaughtered Microsoft, which is little more than a third placed bit player. Silverlight is lost in the shadow of Flash.

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