European Commissioner for competition Neelie Kroes has decidedly delivered another blow to the software giant Microsoft. In her latest report she suggests that computers should not be bundled with Windows. The operating system market is extremely dominated by Windows today and it doesn’t really seem to be an especially healthy climate overall. Until today, she and the Commission has focused on Microsoft’s server software and the bundling of Windows Media Player with Windows, but now she has decided to investigate the matter of the bundling of Windows with new computers.
“Recent years have certainly seen innovation in high technology markets,” Ms Kroes says, “but largely in areas that Microsoft does not control.”
Harsh words indeed, but when you think about it there really is no competition on the home operating system market. If you compare it to the very diverse computer hardware market there is almost an excess of companies, while there is practically only Microsoft operating systems on home computers.
Hardware has been evolving rapidly over the last few years, but thanks to industry standards there is a broad compatibility among these. There is really no reason for why operating systems shouldn’t have evolved in the same way, the report suggests. That is, if we have a healthy competition on the operating system market, which we don’t.
“Or, to put it another way, if there are ten major operating system vendors, independent software houses are going to write their software using coding tools and “programming libraries” that will enable their software to work on all the systems, rather than just one. Competition would encourage open standards and interoperability as vendors would, for competitive reasons, want their products to interact with other vendors’ products.” – Alex Singleton, Globalisation Institute.
All in all, her report does have more than a few good points, and considering how things have been going for Microsoft, I would think that this would lead to that European computer stores will have to offer Windows as an add-on, like any other piece of hardware or software, and not bundled.
