Everything, Everything

Several years ago, the European Commission told Microsoft to make versions of Windows XP available in Europe that did not contain Windows Media Player. This made the EC happy. Pretty much no one bought them. Sales of Windows XP N represented just 0.005 per cent of overall XP sales in Europe by April 2006 - the last time Microsoft released figures (probably because no one's bought any more copies in the last 3 years).

Recently, Microsoft announced that they plan on releasing versions of Windows 7 that do not contain Internet Explorer 8. This made the EC unhappy. It appears they would prefer to see Microsoft ship Windows 7 with a variety of competing browsers.

Can anyone else see the inconsistency? Why were they happy for Microsoft to remove an application from the operating system, but not happy for them to... erm... remove an application from the operating system? I suspect it's because they were getting serious pressure from the people behind Opera and Firefox.

There are only three ways Microsoft can sell Windows 7:

• With IE
• Without IE
• With IE and other competing browsers

They'd obviously want to sell it with IE (like Apple do with Safari), but they know the EC won't like that.

So they've chosen to sell it without IE. It's their OS, they can choose not to supply an application, right?

No. It turns out you can't give people choice, you have to give them options. If the EC gets their way, Microsoft will be forced to supply someone else's software on their operating system. That sounds wrong to me.

There's an article on The Register that goes into this in more detail.