Microsoft’s browser lottery
By Wilson • Mar 5th, 2010 • Category: Industry News
- Photo: Microsoft
In settling an antitrust agreement with the EU, Microsoft has sent out a browser selection option that could reach over 200 million Internet users. This arose as a result of Microsoft striking a deal with the EU, which let them abandon the option of shipping Windows 7 without a browser, but rather to ship it with IE and to later ship the browser lottery. This browser will show up on every Internet Explorer user who has turned auto-update on.
Randomly selected
This browser selection screen presents the Windows PC users with 12 browser options, with the first five presented randomly. The decision to present the selection randomly arose as a need to eliminate as many biases as possible since a statistically significant proportion of the population would choose the very first option they are presented with. Smart move by Microsoft.
- Photo: Opera
Admittedly, though, there are five high profile web browsers, namely Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera in order of market share. The other seven smaller scale browsers allow Microsoft to inadvertently direct traffic away from their primary competitors, meaning if the browsing experience is incomplete, the web user will likely revert back to Internet Explorer.
- Photo: Google
The point of the ballad was to show European IE users that they have a choice in which browser they use, and that they are not locked into Internet Explorer. While the tech-savvy know this, a large portion of Internet users use what they get, to the detriment of a competitive market place.
Anti-trust everywhere
Microsoft was the first of the EU’s many multi-billion dollar fine recipients for anti-trust practices. The EU is currently conducting a similar investigation into search giant Google’s online practices, with other search services complaining Google intentionally downranked them.
Tags for this article: EU
