Battle of the giants

Google recently joined the group of companies supporting the European Commission’s investigation into Microsoft over the benefits it gets ahead of its competitors by releasing its Internet Explorer browser with Windows. The complaint was originally filed by one of Microsoft’s software rivals, Opera. The Norway-based company also makes a web browser by the same name, Opera (I wrote about it a while back). Opera says Microsoft doesn’t give customers much of a choice when choosing other browsers — when you install Windows, Internet Explorer comes bundled along. It looks like the European Commission thinks Microsoft has a case to answer to. Its officials said:

“The commission is concerned that through the tying, Microsoft shields Internet Explorer from head-to-head competition with other browsers, which is detrimental to the pace of product innovation and to the quality of products which consumers ultimately obtain.”

In her blog, Mitchell Barker of Mozilla says the statement is correct and that she doesn’t have any doubt about it. Google’s vice-president for product management, Sundar Pichai, also wrote in his blog, that they realise how stiff and largely uncompetitive the browser market is when they were launching their own Google Chrome.

If Google has joined the group of companies against Microsoft, does that mean Yahoo!, Altavista, Microsoft(MSN Live search) and other search engines should also launch a case against Google for unfair dominance in the search-engine market, even online advertising? The way it is at the moment, Google is the default search engine in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, does that mean Google will also agree to remove this preinstalled tool? Will companies also launch a complaint against Apple because it bundles its Safari browser with the Mac OS. Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux come bundled with Firefox, does that mean we have to go after them too?

While the jury is still out over the above scenario shouldn’t we also say that Windows is a Microsoft product and they should be able to ship it out with whatever they want, even if it means gaining an unfair advantage over its competitors. Microsoft has been fined huge amounts of money before over its Windows media player. The statistics show that Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser in the market with 78% of the market. Its main rival, Firefox, is used by about 15% of the market and Apple’s Safari by 5%. Looking at the Mail & Guardian visitors in Google analytics, 68% of them use Internet Explorer, 24% Firefox, 4% Safari, 2.5% Chrome and lastly 1.5% Opera.

In my opinion, the problem with the pre-bundled Internet Explorer is that so far it has shown that you have to have an extensive knowledge of computers to install any other browsers. I attended a Red Hat course with Obsidian last year. There was an accountant from Tanzania in my class. He knew how to get onto the internet, but only with Internet Explorer. We were working with Red Hat Linux so he asked the lecturer how he could check his mail in Linux. The lecturer told him to use Firefox, his first question was, “What is Firefox?” The lecturer had to explain that it’s a web browser just like Internet Explorer.

When I started off in computers I used Internet Explorer and only got to use Mozilla when I understood what computers were all about. Does this mean operating systems should have a web browser bundled with them?