Microsoft Drops Windows 7 E Editions 423
A week after Microsoft agreed to include a browser ballot screen in Windows 7 systems sold in Europe, then announced that those systems would initially include no browser at all — specifically, no Internet Explorer — Microsoft has changed its mind again and dropped talk of a European Windows 7 E edition. Here is the official Microsoft blog announcement, which includes a screen shot of the proposed ballot screen. The browsers are listed left-to-right in order of market share, with IE therefore having pride of place. PC Pro notes that, since the ballot screen would not appear if IE were not pre-installed, Microsoft's proposal opens the door for Google to work with PC manufacturers to get Chrome on new machines. Note that the browser ballot screen has not yet been accepted by the EU, though the initial reaction to it was welcoming.
Re:Obsolete (Score:4, Informative)
Re:In Germany... (Score:3, Informative)
It already is: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-DE-daily-20080701-20090802 [statcounter.com] (Warning: Your ad-blocker might block the site. ^^)
Re:What about... (Score:2, Informative)
Correct, it's even on a variety of MS Blogs. Those who ordered the E versions get the _full_ version of the normal version.
Re:Isn't it time to drop the bill gates borg icon? (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously, that would be perfect.
Re:Obsolete (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What about... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, MS have already said that they will get the normal version (that the rest of the world does).
Re:Less work for them... (Score:2, Informative)
This is not about Opera. Last time they complained to Microsoft about bundling, they released a special 'N' version of Windows XP that didn't have their media player. The problem was that this didn't have any effect, as people just bought the regular Windows XP version.
This time they want to make sure that people see that they have a choice.
Re:Obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
Not only that but they can make web tools Live/Bing/Hotmail work best with their browser - influencing users of those tools to almost be forced to to use IE.
They've already been bitten by that one. They blocked all browsers except IE [news.com] from accessing MSN.com. After two days of people making noise about it they let everyone view MSN again.
Did they learn? No. Less than two years later [cnet.com] they served a stylesheet to Opera (and only to Opera, other browsers received a working stylesheet and IE had its own) that deliberately broke the display of the page. They served Opera the IE stylesheet, which displayed fine, after some more complaints.
Was that enough for them? No, they tried again with hotmail. They sent Opera an incomplete javascript file [opera.com] that was missing a required function to empty the junk e-mail. Other browsers were sent a different javascript file.
I don't think they'd dare try again with how closely the EU is monitoring them now.
Re:Obsolete (Score:3, Informative)
Same argument you made in a different article about IE. Funny how you always seem to reply to these with the same boiler plate responses. Microsoft's dominance over the Web came with Windows 98's bundling of Internet Explorer 4. The Netscape rewrite had nothing to do with it, and there were other rendering engines and browsers out at the time besides Internet Explorer and Netscape.
Since you're just a paid Microsoft shill, this conversation is pretty much over. You'll always make false claims and bend the truth to make it seem like IE's rise to fame was based on merit, rather than monopoly abuse.
PC Makers can already install Chrome (Score:3, Informative)
>Microsoft's proposal opens the door for Google to work with PC manufacturers to get Chrome on new machines.
This has always been an option. If Google wants to pay PC manufacturers to install Chrome as a default they can do so both in the US and the EU. It's one of the results of the anti-trust cases of the 90s.
Re:How stupid is this whole thing (Score:3, Informative)
Upon the release of Win7 in the EU, MS will be inundated by support calls with "Why is the Internet broken!" or "How do I get on the Internet!". Guess what browser they are going to tell them to install?
Did you RTFA? It doesn't work the way most people expected the whole thing to work (some sort of selection screen at install time).
In this case, the OS is still shipped with a browser - OEM decides which once (I assume IE is still there by default in a clean system, but it is uninstallable). When user starts up his system for the first time after installation, and only if he has IE installed and configured as the default browser by that point, he'll see the "browser ballot screen" (which is really just a web page, opened in IE). If he doesn't understand what is said there at all, he can still close it, and end up with IE installed and properly configured.
I still don't like this whole idea mostly because it effectively mandates Microsoft to directly advertise its competitors (was there any similar precedent in the history of any other monopoly?), and because the format of that advertisement is government-regulated (i.e. if you want to put your browser on the list, EU government decides if it will get there or not). But, if implemented as described in that blog post, it is not going to result in confused users with no way to surf the Web.
Re:Better way to go (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wait (Score:2, Informative)
What I never understood is, how come apple doesn't get into trouble for installing Safari on their comps? I use both OSX and Windows, so I'm not bashing either, just wondering how Microsoft's is a monopoly while Apple's isn't.
Apple doesn't have an overwhelming majority market share on the OS market like Microsoft has. Apple can install browsers of their own manufacture on their own operating system but even if Apple wants to, they still don't have a market share that enables them to leverage their OS to kill off all other browser manufacturers. If Microsoft was just another one of half a dozen OS manufacturers with a 10, 20, 30% market share that shipped it's Microsoft OS with it's own Microsoft browser the same would apply to them. Unfortunately Microsoft has a 90% OS market share and even though Microsoft is doing the same thing when it bundles IE with Windows as Apple does when it bundles Safari with OS X the 90% OS market share of the Microsoft Windows OS changes the rules (according to the EU). Microsoft can and has leveraged their dominant OS market share to also monopolize other software market segments they felt entitled to have all to them selves. If it took Microsoft's fancy they could kill off any competitors in any desktop software market segment they wanted to by simply offering a free (as in $0.00 price tag) competing product and bundling it with their Windows OS. What the EU is trying to do with this ballot screen is not about avenging Netscape it isn't even so much about Microsoft's attempt to dictate web standards by pwning the browser market although that is probably a factor, it is about teaching Microsoft a painful lesson about the consequences of abusing their dominant market position. Which incidentally is something the US Govt. failed miserably to do even though it is in a much stronger position to do so than the EU.
Also, they need to install a browser anyway. If you don't install a browser, then you can't get any browsers so I don't understand what was supposed to happen.
It is trivial to write a non browser based client app that displays a ballot screen and then downloads and installs the browser of your choice. Why exactly people thought that shipping Windows without a browser would be a colossal problem is not quite clear to me.
Last, how is it a monopoly when the product (ie) is non profit (afaik)?
Shipping it's browser for free is how Microsoft established it's browser monopoly in the first place. It's called "dumping" or "predatory pricing" and is a tactic frequently used by greedy mega corporations to drive smaller competitors out of business.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Informative)
That is bullshit.
If the dll came with a given application, that dll will be removed. If it's a standard windows dll, obviously it won't be removed after uninstalling a third party application, and why should it?
Then there is the case where two applications from the same company share a set of dlls, in that case uninstalling one of the applications will not delete the shared dlls, but that is equivalent to first uninstalling one application completely (removing the shared dlls) and then installing the other application (adding the shared dlls again).
applications do NOT leave random dlls behind after installation, unless they are being used by another application as well, in which case the behavior is expected. But it doesn't happen by default.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Informative)
In Vista/W7, typing a URL into Windows Explorer pops open your default browser.
Re:Obsolete (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wait (Score:3, Informative)
Apple's market share could grow to 100% and they still not get into any trouble by installing Safari in every Mac they sell. Why? MS got into troubles not because of the zero price of their products bundled with Windows but because of the anticompetitive deals they made with PC manufacturers: I'll make you pay more for a Windows license if you install anything else but what I accept. If they didn't do that, the bundling of IE would still be fine. MS is being penalized now as an attempt to recreate equal market conditions.
By the way, Apple is the only company that can sell OSX based computers so there are no other manufacturers to bully but I wonder what's going to happen if Apple's market share will reach 25%: how the other manufacturer will react to the shrinking of their market shares? What's sure is that they won't silently die out.
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I would want to choke someone if it was random (Score:3, Informative)
You know, that's all great in theory, and work well in practice in lab situation where you've got lots of computers that are the same. It doesn't work so well when you are supporting tons of random computers in various labs, with various versions and various software sets.
In the case of browsers, well different people want different defaults. We don't dictate one for everyone, they get to have what they want.
I know, I know, at the shop you work at you have a perfect system where you can deploy one image to everyone, and IT just tells people how things are and they obey, and so on and so forth. Well, that's not how it is where I work (a university). Here we actually try to give our customers what they want. That does by its nature mean that we spend more time on tasks since they are going to be more customized.