* Posts by Gavin Mannings

1 publicly visible post • joined 13 Dec 2007

Opera hits Microsoft with EC complaint

Gavin Mannings

@Stu Reeves

Unfortunately most dictionaries do not always have every technical use of a word so misunderstandings can be apparent. The term monopolist is being used in a legal and economic sense, I believe this term can be applied a firm with 40% or greater market share and who takes part in anti-competitive practices.

The idea of solely bundling your own products has already been decided as anti-competitive, mainly because person XYZ who just uses their computer and doesn't know/care what software resides on it will not download or pay for any other software, even if it does it better, and that is the real issue here. If people don't know there are alternatives, or they are too lazy or scared to learn how to use another piece of software. By having just one piece of software permanently associated with a process, such as IE and connecting to the Internet, people do not realise there is competition out there, hence make choices as to which browser to use. If there was a choice of extra browsers being installed this would go some-way to pique uers' interest outside of IE.

As Microsoft try to define their *own* standard, and many users use their product, it means that there is an economic incentive for designers and coders not to follow the more efficient standards or design for other browsers.

Essentially it looks like Opera are trying to stop the 90% of users use IE days.