Microsoft’s Monopoly
You are currently reading my blog, and though you might not realize it, you need an awful lot of help to be able to read this. No, I’m not talking about any glasses you might be wearing. Allow me to explain.
First of all, you’re reading this from the screen of a larger piece of equipment, like a computer. Secondly, you need to fetch this piece of text, and the lovely pictures of course, over the internet from the place I stored them. To be honest I haven’t got a clue where that is, somewhere in the Netherlands I’m sure, but regardless of that: if you enter www.polyplural.com into your address bar, your computer will manage to find my blog. Lastly you need some software. Communicating directly with a computer is hard work for us non-computers, so we gladly pay a couple hundred units of our favourite currency to hire a translator.
Most people know only one such translator, Microsoft Windows. Various iterations of this omnipresent piece of software, accompany millions of people in their diverse and daily computer adventures. And those adventures include regular expeditions into the World Wide Web, just click that little blue internet icon and you’re on your way. Be sure to equip yourself properly before diving into the wild though, there are all sorts of nasties out there you don’t want in your system. Like mosquitoes; the credit card stealing kind.
You would not guess it from looking at it, but behind this logo lies both fact and fiction, knowledge and opinion, badly referenced Wikipedia entries and several generations worth of human stupidity.
At this point a small fraction of the adventurers will protest. Windows alone, you see, isn’t enough to let you enjoy the internet. You need an additional piece of kit for that, something called a browser. Luckily you get one for free with Windows, and it’s called Internet Explorer. There are many others however, well known among them Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. I use the term well known quite lightly here, because compared to Internet Explorer these otherwise fine pieces of software are about as well known as zebras are to penguins.
Obviously the companies behind these browsers aren’t too happy with the status quo. They argue that by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, Microsoft is using its monopoly in the operating system market (in other words: Windows) to get a monopoly in the browser market. This practice is forbidden in most parts of the world, among them Europe, and so the companies behind Firefox, Chrome and Opera have asked the European Commission to do something about it.
Fierce debate about the issues shows us that this might not be as easy as it sounds. Some argue that Firefox managing to gain a good 20 percent share in the browser market, proves that market is more competitive than ever. This might be true, but considering over 50 percent of the internet users don’t even know of the existence of a thing called a browser, even though they’re using one, I’d say Microsoft’s hold on the market is still pretty solid. No, I think there can hardly be any doubt that bundling Internet Explorer with Windows has been hurting other browsers. How could it not?
At this point a lot of people get confused. What about Volkswagen, they say, should it be forced to sell the car engines separately? Sure! After all, the engine industry has suffered greatly from Volkswagen’s dominance in the car market. Then take Paint and WordPad, surely what applies to Internet Explorer applies to them too? Spot on! Let’s not forget that picture and document editing software developers are having a hard time, because everyone is using Paint for poster design and photo editing, and WordPad for writing essays and books.
Perhaps the most convincing argument in defence of Microsoft is that a browser is unmistakably a part of an operating system. I think this very much depends on your definition of an operating system. But let’s not forget that with Windows being pretty much the only operating system people use, it automatically defines what an operating system is. What came first? The chicken or the egg? The operating system or the definition of an operating system?
A short explanation of the chicken or the egg paradox: Consider an egg. After some time it hatches and a chicken is born. If we accept time travel is possible, the chicken can go back in time and turn the egg into an omelette. This, however, would prevent the chicken from being born, and so someone else would have to make the omelette. This tells us time travel is possible, but only in a universe where people like omelettes.
An often heard claim is that if Internet Explorer shouldn’t be bundled with Windows, then the same could be said for a large number of other bundled applications. Paint and Wordpad are obviously stupid examples, but what about Media Player, Movie Maker or Media Center? I agree we have a problem here, but one that stretches in two directions: What about pieces of software that aren’t bundled with Windows yet, but might be in the future? By simply bundling new applications with Windows, Microsoft has the power to conquer pretty much any software market, and has in fact done exactly that repeatedly in the past. Not only with browsers, but also with media players, email clients, instant messaging software and virtualization software. Currently it looks like anti-virus software will be next in line.
I don’t claim to have a solution to this problem. I do believe that responding to the situation by saying that a browser is simply a part of an operating system, is extremely short sighted, and ignorant of the way Microsoft is throwing its weight around in pretty much any software market. Somehow, somewhere, a line must be drawn between what an operating system is and isn’t, and it shouldn’t be Microsoft doing the drawing.