Simon

Cumbria

IT

The logic is flawed, very badly !

There is nothing wrong with Microsoft bundling certain facilities into an OS, the problem is when they do so in support of a monopolistic approach to 'seeing off' the competition.

As for the secure house analogy, there would be nothing wrong with offering to fit secure locks and windows at a reasonable price. What would be a problem would be using a proprietry design of window so that other window suppliers were not able to provide windows on a level footing.

What IS going to happen is that vendors (not just MS) will bundle more and more functionality into the base products (such as secure locks and windows as standard) and the third parties will have to adapt their business/market accordingly.

To give an example, there used to be a market for MP3 playing software. Now there is no OS shipping without the inbuilt ability to play MP3s. The vendors of MP3 players have either disappeared or moved on to something else. Tough, but unless (as MS have pointed out in the past) we are prepared to put a halt to progress it is the way things are going to go.

To see how things change just take a look at the automotive world. There's still a number of suppliers of aftermarket accessories - but non of them are now selling indicator light kits, or heated rear window kits, or even (going back a bit further) side & headlight kits. All these parts are no standard on almost all new cars - just as many functions now done by extra software will get subsumed into the OS over time.

What we have to be on our guard about is the ability of a large player like MS to explicitely target a market and destroy all competition by the simple act of bundling (for free or at zero cost) it's own software, or by making it's own software the default unless the customer makes a concious decision to use something else.

And this is where I would not like to be sitting in judgement !