I'm actually quite relieved to see some of the opinions expressed here - I too can't understand Brussels' thinking on this. And issues of competition and regulation are a passion of mine.
The question is simply this: is Microsoft engaging in anti-competitive conduct, or is it just a tough competitor? To my mind, they're just a tough competitor. There's no doubt that Microsoft has tremendous market power - Windows is the dominant OS, which the vast majority of consumers use. In and of itself, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Microsoft is not actively stopping anyone else from starting up a rival OS, but most firms just don't see it as commercially viable to do so. There are open source solutions out there, and there are different products for niche markets, but by and large the monopoly that Microsoft effectively has is not something that they have deliberately set up - although they clearly benefit from it. Computer users benefit from having a common standard, which Microsoft to all intents and purposes offers through Windows.
In saying that, the standard does have a problem. Microsoft has created the standard, and therefore its own products are likely to have an advantage. Interoperability is an important issue. If Microsoft deliberately sets out to make it difficult for non-Microsoft products to be used on computers running Windows, then that is anti-competitive conduct. It restricts consumer choice. There is some evidence that Microsoft has done this in the past, however I'm not convinced that they're still doing this today. Microsoft may still be a tough competitor, but in my view, it plays more 'fairly' that it has in the past. I certainly don't agree that Microsoft should have to hand over proprietary coding to rivals. The coding is the product Microsoft offers. If Microsoft reveals to the world how Windows works, then competitors will find it much easier to simply replicate it and offer the same thing. That is a bad outcome - it discourages innovation, and destroys commercial enterprise.
There is a related issue associated with bundling. This has emerged with things like IE and Windows Media Player. There is a suggestion that by packaging these products within Windows, it means consumers don't go out and buy other products - a Netscape web-browser in the old days, or software like Real Player or QuickTime or whatever else. Yet to my mind, that gives too narrow a definition to what an OS should be. The beauty of Windows, despite any concerns about bugs and security, is that it has made the world of computing relatively more accessible to people. Others, like Apple in particular, have obviously contributed to that - but really, it's Microsoft that gets a lot of the credit, because that's what people have bought into. To tech-heads, sure, an OS gives them a platform on which they can install a bunch of software that they want to do X, Y and Z. But to Joe Bloggs, the layman, they buy a computer and they want it to work. They want to check e-mails, surf the internet, play some media files, type some documents up (even within Windows, there's often a basic word processor, although MS Office is obviously a separate package). Is it really a bad thing that Microsoft delivers those functions to users within Windows? Clearly the EU does. Yet nothing has stopped me from installing Firefox or Netscape before it on my computer, nothing has stopped me from running RealPlayer, QuickTime and Winamp. Microsoft hasn't taken any choices away from me as a consumer - I don't see how it's anti-competitive.
Contrast that to Apple though, whose conduct with the iPhone has been absolutely disgraceful in my view. I admit, it's a shameless plug, but I covered this issue earlier in the week
on my blog, and I don't want to necessarily repeat all of it again. By way of precis though, the exclusivity arrangements between Apple and mobile phone carriers are entirely anti-competitive in nature. These are forcing people who want to buy an iPhone to sign up to a carrier of Apple's choosing - not the consumer's. In the US, it's AT&T; in the UK I understand it's O2. I know there are similar (though not identical) arrangements in Germany and France, and I expect that Apple will try to launch the iPhone in other markets with similar schemes. Yet where are the competition authorities? Where are the consumer watchdogs? Instead Brussels would rather keep beating Microsoft over the head for perceived grievances that the rest of the world has seldom taken issue with. And consumers are left worse off for it.