#comments

Man. So I scoped out on FriendFeed this piece on how Mozilla is joining the EU lawsuit against Microsoft and it’s diabolical IE bundling schemes. Look, I’ll state right here, I hate IE. I hate IE with a passion so fiery it would consume me completely if not for my mastery of cooling mind kung-fu. IE6-8 should be punished certainly, for crimes against web developers. Their continued lack of standards compliance (or even comprehensive auto upgrading) has, if my experience is any example, cost the web world thousands upon thousands of hours trying to make web sites look good on IE6 and 7.

But that’s not what this law suit is about. It’s about Microsoft’s monopoly. Really? Come on. Are we still on this crap? Microsoft’s browser share has been falling steadily for years – this is non-trivial stuff. Their share is being steadily and meaningfully eroded. It’s not a monopoly anymore. There’s competition. Look Opera, I know you have a cult following, but people just don’t want your browser. Firefox is moving up the charts, so it can obviously be done. Why does the law need to be brought into this?

It generally turns out that bundling is kinda good for me, the consumer. And you know what, if you make the OS, you get to put some software on it, too. That’s kinda how it goes. I don’t want to make a thousand choices about which app for which use I want before I get my computer, just give me whatever and if I want something else I’ll figure it out. Because why stop at the browser? What about the command prompt? What about mac’s? Should Apple be forced to stop bundling iLife with their macs? I mean, Google makes Picassa for mac now – their market share sucks? But it would suck to stop getting iLife.

Or wait! My iPhone comes with all kinds of apps, a calendar, an email client, a web client, music player, etc… When I buy my iPhone maybe I should also have to fill out a survey that let’s me choose from a dozen options I’ve never heard of for each of those apps. Otherwise it’s not fair! Lawyers, unite!

My point here is that, sure the OS makers get a little advantage because they made the OS. But it is demonstrably not an insurmountable one. The alternatives – unbundling or else requiring consumer choice are sucky alternatives. If it’s to be a choice, who gets to decide what the choices are? This is a slippery slope down to stupid. When you get the law into things, that law tends to come back and bite you in the ass because someone else is going to use it for something that you didn’t really think about or maybe even wasn’t a concern when it happened.