Published at LXer:

Lately, a lot of talk has been coming out of Europe. The talk I am referring to concerns an anti-trust case against Microsoft for bundling a web browser they make with an operating system they make. The claim is that Microsoft has made competition in the web browser market difficult because Internet Explorer is included with Microsoft's Windows (a computer operating system).

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Europeans are not the brightest star.

Galileo Galilei
Sir Isaac Newton
Blaise Pascal
Nicolaus Copernicus
James Clerk Maxwell
Albert Einstein
Neils Bohr
Max Planck
Marie and Pierre Curie
Erwin Schrodinger
Werner Heisenberg
Paul Dirac
Prince Louis deBroglie
Max Born
Wolfgang Pauli
John Von Neumann
Alan Turing
Alexander Fleming
Francis Crick

Yeah. Right bunch of thickies

And that's just the ones I can recall off the top of my head

But when it comes to being dim, we can't beat some Americans.

Wheeling swiftly back around to the article at hand: I think that the EU chose the wrong anticompetitive action to complain about. I don't care which browser Microsoft bundles with their operating system. Granted, when the suit was brought, all the world used IE6, which sucks and has implications for web developers, but IE6 is about to die of old age. What bothers me is the fact that Microsoft has strong armed all of the OEMs in to bundling Microsoft with the PC its self, and made it very clear to the OEMs that the pricing of the Microsoft operating system would go up substantially if another OS was installed. This means that unless I very specifically request a refund from Microsoft, or go way out of my way, I'm going to pay them for an OS that I'm not going to use.

Again, I think that the landscape has shifted somewhat in regard to this; Dell's been shipping Linux for years now, and notebook computers have changed things as well, but dammit, I'm still bitter.

I beg to differ. I work with a several large companies that still have IE6 as their standard browser. They wrote a lot of software to work with IE6 and now are faced with the fact that moving off of it breaks that software. So they either have to spend a ton of money to re-code their software or stick with IE6.

Embrace, extend, extinguish was (and is) a HUGELY successful strategy for Microsoft.

You forgot Renee Decartes.

Yep, we now have something to boast about. We aren't that bright, and have the highest deficit in the world, YEA!!! We're #1 in something again! WOO! (pathetic, huh?)

true
but that is just plain stupid

They did it to try to stop the M$ monopoly for the web browser ... and hopefully soon they may address the OS monopoly.

While I realize that you really make no attempt at restraining yourself from insults to others, you really should try. Especially in this case what you say makes no sense. First of all, since when have governments spoken for what the people truly think and want ? Second, what has the US done about the M$ monopoly on pretty much everything software (other than help it out) ? Third, the real stupid one here is blogger who wrote this piece of garbage.