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 Conventional wisdom has it that monopolies are bad things, to be disencouraged and even legislated against. Microsoft is no stranger to such sentiments, having found itself at the wrong end of several lawsuits in the past, many of them instigated by the European Commission. In 2004, for example, the EC fined Microsoft nearly half a billion euros and demanded that it disclose various information about its servers, and release a version of Windows XP for the European market that did not contain Windows Media Player, at the behest of its competitors. In 2008, the fine was increased by nearly a billion euros for failure to comply. More recently, the EC has been investigating the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows, coming to the conclusion that “Microsoft’s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between Web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice.” Microsoft’s original response was that it would ship a version of Windows 7 to EU countries that did not include IE. However it is now seeking approval to ship a full version that offers a ‘ballot screen’ from which users can choose to install a different browser from the Web. We need to tread carefully here. Monopolies may be bad but standards are good, and what is one person’s monopoly may be another’s standard - yes, a standard that has become established through brute strength in the marketplace, rather than through endlessly deliberating committees, but a standard nonetheless. I can remember when, back in the 1980s as editor of What PC? magazine, we had two ACT Apricot PCs in the office for testing. The Apricot was of course totally incompatible with the IBM PC, although both ran the same operating system. What did raise an eyebrow was their incompatibility with each other, despite having coming off the same production line only a month or two apart. Such incompatibilities severely hindered the software industry of the time. Not only did you have to produce separate versions of your application for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh: you also had to think about versions for the Apricot PC, the Atari ST, the BBC Micro, the Commodore range, the Sinclair QL, the Amstrad CPC and PCW, and so on. Most software companies breathed a sigh of relief once it became clear that Windows was going to take over the world (unless, of course, they happened to make operating systems). The dominance of Windows in the marketplace - together with the Intel/PC platform on which it runs - establishes a standard that benefits software companies by lowering the barriers to entry and reducing the cost of establishing a market. It has also simplified the job of the systems administrator - unless of course they have to cater for the Macintoshes beloved of design departments, as well as the Windows machines used by everyone else. Legislation does have a place in maintaining fair play, but sometimes it is best left to the market to sort it out.
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