Industry groups criticized and praised on Monday what they consider is a bias in favor of open-source software in the European Commission's plans to update the rules governing industry standard technologies.
A lack of political vision and weak internal coordination at the European Commission have prevented Europe from reaping the rewards of advances in online services, according to EdiMA, a trade group representing the biggest names in Internet technologies.
Microsoft's plan to dump Internet Explorer (IE) from Windows 7 for the European market is a move to discredit antitrust regulators by tying its proposal to a failed enforcement effort from 2005, a noted antitrust expert said today.
Microsoft bent to pressure from European Union antitrust regulators today, saying that it will ship Windows 7 to the EU market this fall minus Internet Explorer 8. The company made the call this week to keep Windows 7's European ship date in sync with the rest of the world.
Windows 7 will ship without Internet Explorer in Europe, in an effort by Microsoft to offer the product on time and without running afoul of competitive regulations in Europe, the company said.
It sounds odd, but the European Commission's solution to the problem caused by Microsoft bundling its Internet Explorer browser into the Windows OS appears to be more, rather than less, bundling.
The European Commission claims it is acting in the interests of consumers in pursuing an antitrust ruling against Microsoft for bundling its Internet Explorer into the Windows OS, but unbundling them would be a nightmare for independent software developers, said Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), on Monday.