[outside1234]

You needed to be around in the 1990s to understand this. :)

Its sort of like Google search now where when you search for "ann arbor map" you get a giant beautiful link to another Google property and a few riffraff links to other competitors that basically nobody ever clicks on because it would take effort.

This is exactly where Microsoft was in the 90s / early 2000s with browsers. They had a dominant desktop share and they directly embedded IE and although there were alternatives, clicking takes effort and nobody did that. They just used IE. The EU forced them to provide an explicit, easy option to reduce that advantage.

Given Google's dominant share in search, it would not be surprising to me to see the EU force them to change this for the same competition reasons.

Also, it was a great way for the EU to shake Microsoft down for billions of dollars and ensure there was no one company more powerful than the EU, but I'll leave that to the conspiracy theorists.

[walkon]

I was there in the 90s. Only having access to Windows when the Internet became common, guess how I went about learning there were other browsers out there and downloading Netscape?

How much more difficult would that have been if IE wasn't included by default with Windows?

[laumars]

Not that much harder since software demo disks often came bundled with consumer magazines.

In fact back in the 90s, my Linux box would only receive updates via magazine cover disks.

[walkon]

Are you saying Microsoft should have intentionally excluded a means to browse http content and instead directed customers to be on the lookout for consumer magazines with a demo disk containing a browser? Where and how do they draw the line to being a useful distribution and alienating their users? For example, certain ICMP utilities were included by default with Windows.

[laumars]

> Are you saying Microsoft should have blah blah blah...

No, I'm not saying Microsoft should have done anything specific. My post quite clearly says that a lot of useful software was still easily available to those who's internet access was a premium; and nothing more.

However now I think about it, I'm pretty sure I got my copy of Internet Explorer 4 (the one that integrated IE's Triedent engine into Windows Explorer) from a .Net magazine* cover CD. So it's not like browsers weren't also distributed via the aforementioned method.

(*not to be confused with Microsoft .NET)

> Where and how do they draw the line to being a useful distribution and alienating their users? For example, certain ICMP utilities were included by default with Windows.

Now you're just arguing for the sake of having an argument.