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EU Set To Charge Microsoft Over Ruling Breach
New submitter quippe writes in with some bad news for Microsoft. "Microsoft Corp will be charged for failing to comply with a 2009 ruling ordering it to offer a choice of web browsers, the European Union's antitrust chief said on Thursday, which could mean a hefty fine for the company. U.S.-based Microsoft's more than decade-long battle with the European Commission has already landed it with fines totaling more than a billion euros ($1.28 billion). The Commission, which opened an investigation into the issue in July, is now preparing formal charges against the company, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said."
I think you are living on another planet. Some corrections:
They don't provider any infrastructure. Neither does UNIX/Linux. Most of the infrastructure is dedicated hardware still. People like F5, Juniper, Cisco, Alcatel, Lucent etc. Most of this stuff runs on custom platforms and kernels and occasionally something esoteric like Erlang. Hardly any of it sits on *NIX platforms, bar mail relays.
As for servers running UNIX/Linux - yes there are lots. I mean look at Google, Facebook and most of the hosting companies out there. However you miss one important point: none of these are supporting critical business functions. Even if you look a the mainframe and big iron side of things (ex Sun/Unisys territory), it's all moving to Windows as the value proposition is better. The only thing that remains is mass market web hosting, cloud providers and the odd obscure installation of specialist systems (supercomputers, trading platforms, big finance, people stuck with Oracle).
As for the comment about most offices using a browser to access a centralised application: that is utter crap. Most people are still using Office and mailing documents to each other cluelessly - and that's not a problem because it works for them. The next upscaling option for them is to use a Windows fileserver. The option after that is Sharepoint. As for dedicated applications, it's all desktop still. The uptake of "HTML5 wah wah" is purely a consumer market and very small business thing. From medium to large enterprises and a lot of industry sectors, it's actually pretty much illegal to throw your stuff in the cloud or push it out. Internal web applications (which I will say that I architect for a living) are literally at the cutting edge in business - there is virtually no market penetration and businesses still don't trust them.
Internet Explorer: it's a component. It's a flipping COM server that sits in MSHTML.dll. It's called code reuse. It's a good thing. It's like having a shared library on UNIX. As a counterpoint "Ubuntu default install ships with XPI .so - get the EU to ban it". It's also hardly embedded into the OS if you've ever looked. You can unregister it and remove IE completely and it functions fine still (bar some MMC plugins).
You don't have to buy Windows. We buy stuff without windows because we've got a volume license so it makes no sense. We get stuff without Windows from HP, Dell, DNUK. That is bollocks. Consumers don't care - they want something that they can turn on and get warez and pr0n on. It's only a minority that give a crap.
Now I'm a fan of UNIX based operating systems. I like the design of them, I have used them for 25 years, I have a Sun Ultra 30 sitting next to me with OpenBSD on it which does some of my specialist donkey work and runs crap I write 15-20 years ago so I don't have to port it, but the Lenovo T61 with Windows 7 that sits next to it does the stuff that pays the bills and talks to the things that other people talk to.
Getting shit done is orders of magnitude more important than politics and being the finest zealot.