28 Feb 2010
Browser Choice
Whether or not you agree with the mandate that Microsoft provide a screen for users to pick which browser to use, it’s interesting to think about how much of a precedent this could set, at least in the E.U. countries.
Granted, Microsoft has faced a great deal of antitrust scrutiny, so it’s not clear that the putative measures leveraged by the E.U. would apply to other companies that are also platform-providers.
However, just as a thought experiment, consider what would happen if all platform providers were forced to provide equal measure to the “real players” who sold products that built on that platform:
- Will Apple be forced to do the same for Safari?
- Maybe a little closer to home, would Microsoft be forced to do this for Office competitors? Music player competitors? While a browser is a bit more fundamental/general than a music player, both are applications used to consume various types of information(and, in fact, the distinction between “specialized” apps and browser apps gets thinner every day).
From a business perspective, if this sort of measure were to become more prevalent, would technology suffer? One of Apple’s competitive advantages is it’s control of the entire stack from hardware to user-facing software. Would technology move as fast if the author of the user-facing software could not affect change as efficiently in lower levels of the stack as needed to improve user experience?
