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Story: How the EC's ruling will affect Longhorn

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I feel sorry for Netscape. I also feel sorry for the consumers who blindly use Internet Explorer, despite Mozilla being far superior (in my opinion - I'm never going back), because it's there. This is exactly the question this trial is raising.

People say "Let them keep Media Player in, if people want other things, they'll download them". Well the only people who will download other things are those that are technical enough to know about them. Everyone else will use Media Player, just because it's there already. Why should anyone go away and get a different media player if they've already got one?

The problem here is that anyone loading up MS Media Player gets taken to MS's internet media page. Someone loading up RealPlayer gets taken to Real's internet media page, where the companies can make money by selling advertising, selling their encoders, whatever else. When MS has 90% of the market, because everyone uses their media player, where's the income for anyone else?

Would you consider this fair if MS had gained this market share, not because people chose to use their media player rather than anything else, but just because they didn't realise there was a choice, or didn't take the time to find out about it?

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