It's a balance thing - If you extrapolate it to the point where MS bundled everything and the kitchen sink with their OS, it would kill off almost everyone and they would indeed become an all encompasing omni-corp with the world at it's mercy.
Of course, this is slightly bunk, because people aren't FORCED to use things like MediaPlayer and IE, they just do because they are too lazy/thick.
IE has a stranglehold on the market, yes, but it got this way because Netscape was crap.
Before then, it was Netscape that had a monopoly on webbrowsers but nobody *****ed about them - It was only after MS went and made a better browser (IE1&2 died miserably, IE3 'tho, that kicked NS3's ass) that they got killed off.
Of course, they stupidly sat on their laurels after their Embrace&Extend killing tactics, and IE is now in danger of being killed off by FF, but that's the way of things
While mostly applauded, I can see this decision it causing problems because it sets a dangerous precedent - Cut it another way and extrapolate that, and you could have commercial compiler companies getting an injuction against GCC -
"It's not fair, them bundling a free compiler with their distro, it is an unfair competitive practice!"
And then we can get silly: Most of you (the deluded XP users anyways
) probably like the transparent Zip File access - It's handy and neat, but what if PK/WinZip called them out for it?
Or better yet, the EditPad/UltraEdit people calling MS out over Notepad? Where does it end?
We can only hope that the judges can make informed and sensibly balanced solutions about such things.
...
Damn, we're ****ed aren't we?
