I think it would be interesting to see what would happen if Microsoft decided not to sell their products in Europe. Who will small software houses that have not been able to establish a large user following ready and eager to spend money for their product file suites against then?
Would Opera per say launch an anti-trust anti-competition suite against KDE for including Konqueror or against the major Linux distro's for including Firefox and having it selected for installation by default? Would other companies begin to follow suite and try to tear away at the GNU/LINUX ecosystem to get there products included possibly with a royalty.
I am actually somewhat more interested in knowing if the EU requires all of these web browsers to be installed on all government computers so that those users have the option to choose which one they prefer. If anyone has a concrete answer to this please post it. It would be interesting to know if they are taking all measures available to promote competition or possibly just trying to pinch some fine money out of a wealthy company and create a little controversy.
Who knows maybe this will help Opera, FireFox and Chrome increase their market share. Since history shows this approach hasn't worked to well in the past I am going to assume that it will not work in the present.
Personally if I was them I would spend more time and efforts marketing the features my product has and informing the public masses as to why I believe my product is superior to the competition and then prove it to them. This is how you build a loyal following.
Another thing that is interesting is that if Microsoft removes IE then how would someone with only a single system be able to go out to the web to download one of the alternatives.
I guess one thing the EU did not think about is forcing a software vendor to include additional code or forcing a hardware distributor to include this extra software has additional cost to implement and sustain. Which would undoubtedly be passed on to the consumer by the way. Maybe Microsoft looked at this cost and found is was less expensive to simply remove IE and let the hardware vendor and consumer fend for themselves on how they would acquire a browser. If so then this may be nice to help GNU/LINUX adoption.
As far as for the cost differences for Microsoft products. Hardware vendors do pay less than individual consumers. This has to do with a large number of factors. First retail markup, packaging and shipping costs or course and the big one bulk purchase discount. Every large vendor in the world gives discounts for large bulk purchases. Why should Microsoft have to be different.
I personally believe the only person who should choose what OS and accompanying software they want to run is the person who owns the system. I use GNU/LINUX because its flexibility suits all of my needs the most efficiently. For me it also brought the enjoyment back into my working and playing needs. I personally can not say the same about the other options in the market. I am sure others feel this way about the OS and apps they use and don't want to do with out them. My better half feels this way about Windows Vista. All of the ISV products she likes to do her work runs on it and of course her favorite on-line shopping site to buy European Fashion, ironic except that it is a Korean distributor, is IE7 crippled.
http://www.otto.co.kr which she will not do with out. She's able to do what she wants and needs to do, I have to suffer the mild irritation of performing maintenance to her computers but where both happy and co-exist with our different choices.