

Microsoft - An expensive error - CaptainZapp
http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/03/microsoft

======
bhauer
Microsoft failed to comply with a requirement of a legal settlement, so they
are obligated to pay the fine. I doubt anyone here has reservations with that
point because it's simply an artifact of the rule of law.

However, the reason several of us find this news disturbing is that we found
the original judgment disturbing and the fine reminds that the judgment's
settlement requirements are still in play even though, with every passing day,
they become more anachronistic. A reminder of a slow-moving government
interfering with and not understanding technology to the point of actually
damaging technology in the long-term.

The market and technological evolution meted justice to Microsoft in a purer
form: loss of market share via improved competition.

I am a fan of Mozilla (by which I mean the lineage of Netscape and Mozilla). I
had deeply mixed feelings when the US Department of Justice went after
Microsoft for attempting to coerce Windows users into also using Internet
Explorer. They made it especially easy to use Internet Explorer, sure. They
encouraged naive users to think "Internet Explorer" simply was the Internet,
sure. But they never once prohibited me from installing Netscape, Mozilla
Suite, or Firefox.

Moreover, they never prohibited me from encouraging friends and family to do
the same. If those friends and family rejected my recommendation it wasn't
because Microsoft was being anti-competitive; it was because at the time
Mozilla was genuinely not-so-great. It was my preference but not everyone's.
Still, I considered it my duty, in a manner of speaking, to support Mozilla at
all costs because Microsoft was evil.

Yes, I considered Microsoft to be an "evil" (using the word in a very
lightweight way) actor in the market. I didn't like how Mozilla was being
treated. But on the other hand, I don't feel that anything they did should be
considered illegal. If I recall, the only thing I found especially distasteful
was how difficult they made it to remove the Internet Explorer icon from the
Windows desktop. Like "Recycle Bin" and "My Computer," it required a bit more
force.

I also didn't like how even after I installed Mozilla, IE would come up in odd
places like applications' help files. So I couldn't outright uninstall it. But
flipped around, and reviewed with a modern eye, they were incorporating HTML
rendering into non-browsing contexts well before most of us decided that,
yeah, HTML is probably a decent platform for rendering styled text in a
variety of contexts. Might as well embed an HTML rendering control. We just
didn't like that it was IE's Trident (or whatever it was called back then). We
wanted it to be Gecko, or later Webkit.

I am convinced that Microsoft slowed down and all but paused their browser
development effort with IE 6 at least in part thanks to the legal pressures
they were facing from the US and EU. I know that had I been at the Microsoft
helm, I'd consider the web browser somewhat tainted and would try to focus
engineering and sales efforts somewhere else where my organization wasn't
feeling as much government heat, deserved or otherwise.

Years later, I think, they decided to test the waters again, slowly at first.
Eventually they awakened to the fact that Internet Explorer had been
completely eclipsed during that time, and it has taken them years to catch up.
Some would argue that IE 10 is only today roughly at feature parity with its
competition.

When you and I bad-mouth Internet Explorer 6, I recommend we direct at least a
portion of our vitriol at the DOJ and EU. If I am right that Microsoft's
seizing up of browser development was motivated even in part by their legal
troubles, then the DOJ and EU are partially and indirectly responsible for the
IE 6 malaise. Government meddling, I believe, actually made the situation
worse for us.

But the EU insists on continuing to meddle, to continue punishing Microsoft
even though the rest of the market looks on and laughs.

When people say, "why aren't they going after Apple for iOS?" I hope they are
being rhetorical. That would be awful. The DOJ and EU should not go after
either organization. When one perceives monopoly, it's important to be as
serious and objective as possible: is it possible that the preferred product
is actually the best for customers, even if for reasons we don't agree with,
such as ease of use? Allow the market to sort itself out. The market is doing
really quite well without the meddling--at least among those who have avoided
it--so, thank you, but no thank you.

~~~
bd_at_rivenhill
Without the legal pressure, the status quo would have remained, websites would
still be optimized for quirks in how Explorer renders HTML (unless the
developers were passionate enough about openness to spend the extra effort to
work correctly for all browsers), and there wouldn't have been much incentive
to improve Gecko or Webkit because Microsoft could just introduce
incompatibilities into its rendering that would cause compliant websites to
break other renderers.

In an imaginary world where Android doesn't exist and iOS dominates the mobile
world in the same way that windows dominated the desktop, I would hope that
authorities would constrain them to prevent a similar scenario from happening
with mobile browsing and apps. At a certain level of market share, these
things become equivalent to natural monopolies such as electric power
utilities and fixed-line telecom where providers would be able to economically
bar new market entrants and then abuse customers at their leisure unless
regulated.

------
freehunter
Sometimes the EU regulators seem to have such forward thinking and great
ideas. I don't feel this is one of those times. A browser selection screen as
a legal requirement, as well as the decision that they have to offer Windows
without Media Player installed, seem to me to just be ridiculous requirements
levied on Microsoft in an age where these decisions are increasingly
irrelevant. There's no browser selection screen required for Windows RT or
Windows Phone. Nor is there a requirement for browser selection on OSX, iOS,
Linux distros, Android, or ChromeOS (imagine if that were the case...). In
fact, the majority of those platforms _require_ you to use the built-in
browser, something Microsoft has never done with IE on the desktop. There's
always been the choice of what software you want to install, up to the point
when mobile devices gained popularity.

What the EU is trying to do is make competition more fair. What they're doing,
in effect, seems to be making sure Microsoft has all the disadvantages the
legislators can legally throw at them. I worked at a company that did this for
employees it wanted to fire, making new requirements that couldn't possibly be
met and when the employee failed they were fired for not meeting them. It's
obvious the EU wants to fire Microsoft, in an age where competition has never
been so fierce (and not due to a browser ballot).

~~~
dsr_
> Nor is there a requirement for browser selection on OSX, iOS, Linux distros,
> Android, or ChromeOS (imagine if that were the case...). In fact, the
> majority of those platforms require you to use the built-in browser

Erm. iOS and ChromeOS require you to use the built in browser. In the Chrome
case, there's a reasonable reason for that. None of the others you mention
have that.

~~~
jmduke
iOS requires you to have the built-in browser installed; they don't require
you to use it. (You can download and install Chrome for iOS, but you can never
remove Safari.)

Still, this isn't a monopolistic concern until iOS has a monopoly. iOS's
marketshare is nowhere near Windows' was when the anti-trust regulations were
enacted.

~~~
freehunter
Chrome on iOS uses the Safari back-end. Only the GUI is different. Apple will
not let you install a completely new browser on iOS.

------
Permit
I can't help but be reminded of: <http://xkcd.com/1118/> as I read this.

Bundling a browser with an operating system seems much more innocent than the
lack of openness in the mobile world.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Plus even more scary, on iOS they only allow a single browser/engine. Yes, you
can get "Chrome" for iOS but it is really just a skinned Safari.

Android might not be perfect but at least you get a real choice of browser on
there.

~~~
kmfrk
Does the Opera app run on WebKit?

~~~
masklinn
Opera Mini does not run on Webkit. It's a rather special case as it does all
rendering on a remote server, the client essentially just lays out an image.

------
epo
I'm sure this will go off topic fairly quickly but the fine is for not
complying (between 02/2011 and 07/2012) with an order to display a browser
selection screen during system setup.

~~~
bentcorner
Odd that in 3/2011 nobody said anything. How was the EU able to determine this
time period?

~~~
CurtHagenlocher
Because the error specifically occurred with the introduction of Windows 7
Service Pack 1.

------
manishsharan
Microsoft may make the best browser but our IT will see to it that it always
behaves like IE6.

IE gets a bad rep -- and it is mainly because most of us working for big cos
are forced to use the most extremely locked down version of IE at work. These
versions are created by IT drones for other drones and their policies are
designed to cover their asses during audit. The only purpose of a corporate
locked down IE is to serve you intranet pages or access sharepoint. So when a
drone like me gets home and fires up his laptop, its always anything but IE.

------
brudgers
So now we know why Sinofsky was shown the door after the release of Windows 8.
It wasn't a petty power struggle, it was a 3/4 billion dollar fuckup and he
was responsible.

~~~
fghh45sdfhr3
Well not I am wondering was it a real mistake, or did the company decide
they'd rather pay what ever fine if it means they get to delay presenting any
other browser for as long as possible?

~~~
brudgers
I find it implausible that IE earned Microsoft half a billion euros in net
revenue over the course of 18 months. It has been many years since bundling IE
with Windows has provided a strategic business advantage - making IE the
default simply streamlines their support costs by avoiding the finger pointing
that occurs between browser vendors and Redmond when something doesn't work
quite right...such as security.

------
btilly
The following sentence leaped out at me. _The latest version of Internet
Explorer is considered to be on a par with its rivals._ Really? Considered by
whom?

~~~
ceejayoz
IE 9/10 are actually pretty decent. They don't have a lot of the not-quite-
standards-yet bells and whistles Webkit's rapidly iterating on, but from a
development standpoint I'm having to make essentially zero IE-specific
hacks/fixes in those versions.

~~~
btilly
So they support the set of features that you want to use.

But in <http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html> they are still dead last.
And you sometimes need to jump through special hoops to get that level of
compatibility - for instance without a custom http header you can't get
compatibility mode for intranet sites. IE 10 still lacks standard competitor
features such as a nicely sandboxed private mode. (Often jokingly called "porn
mode".) And, as you note, competitors like Webkit are rapidly moving the bar
for the future.

In no way is this "on par with". "No longer horribly unacceptable compared to"
I could grant you. But not "on par with".

~~~
freehunter
> IE 10 still lacks standard competitor features such as a nicely sandboxed
> private mode.

Not true. This was included in IE9.

[http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-
explorer/product...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-
explorer/products/ie-9/features/in-private)

------
Yaggo
"Although _alternative browsers_ such as [...]"

Oh please. I don't hate any stupid pair of words more than _that_ one.
(Emphasis mine.)

------
jerf
It's funny seeing all those browser marketing materials next to each other.
Apparently, every single browser is faster than all the others.

~~~
Zirro
With the exception of Maxthon, which claims of "unsurpassed speed" I find very
dubious, they only claim to be "fast" rather than the fastest.

------
Mahn
So, this might be a stupid question, but I'm curious: Where does the money of
the fine actually go? It's just being collected by these EU regulators and
sits in their bank accounts?

------
dworrad
So on windows I have to manually download another browser... Can someone tell
me how I can purchase music from anywhere other than iTunes on my iPod?

------
recoiledsnake
>In February 2009 64% of all desktop computers used Internet Explorer,
according to data compiled by StatCounter, a web traffic analysis company.Four
years on, that share is only 30%

StatCounter measures pageviews, not "desktop computers", so that statement is
flat out wrong and extremely misleading.

NetMarketShare measures computers, and IE has around 55% marketshare not 30%.

<http://www.netmarketshare.com/>

Why do so many people get this wrong?

~~~
laumars

        > Why do so many people get this wrong?
    

Because it's impossible to get correct. Even Net Market Share can't boast 100%
accuracy. The best we can do is form educated estimations.

~~~
clhodapp
I think the criticism was that the number from the metric was given the wrong
unit (percentage of pageviews vs. percentage of desktop computers), rather
than that the metric itself is fuzzy.

------
xutopia
I've seen countless "bugs" in Internet Explorer and the documentation in their
developer knowledge base was always to "upgrade browser" or "use this vbscript
snippet" or "use this jscript only solution that would cause errors in non IE
browsers".

At some point I got seriously annoyed by them. This fine is a good reminder
that there is some justice in this world.

~~~
monochromatic
This is an odd kind of justice.

