The European Commission has received backing from Google as to whether they should investigate the dominance of Microsoft in the browser market. Currently Microsoft has a majority (over 85%) market share of the browser market. Google has its own web browser named chrome, which is only 6 months old.
After receiving a complaint from another rival Opera, the European Commission has decided that it will investigate whether Microsoft has gained a competitive advantage unfairly by using its operating system to ship out its browser, which is Internet Explorer.
After their initial findings, the European Commission arrived at a conclusion that Microsoft had gained an unfair competitive advantage in the web browser market, which means that Microsoft has been in violation of the European law since 1996.
Microsoft has been given notice that it has to respond to the European Commission by late March. This could mean that Microsoft starts unbundling its web browser from their operating system in hope of escaping any punishment.
By backing the case against Microsoft Google hopes to build a strong case against Microsoft and its abuse of power in the web browser market and thus stop Microsoft continue abusing its power in the browser market.
Microsoft has been trying to prevent Google’s growth by increasing their spending on their own search engine so that it could become more popular thus leaving Google behind. However this has not turned out well because Google is still miles ahead of any of the search engines.
The battle between Microsoft and Google has occasionally been fought in the courtrooms. Last year (2008) Microsoft raised serious anti-trust issues against Google’s plans to combine its adverts with Yahoo. The battle between these two business giants has continuously become more intense with each passing year and there is no slow down in sight.
Another rival of Microsoft, Mozilla has offered to help the European Commission with its current Investigation into Microsoft’s unfair dominance in the web browser market. Mozilla are the makers of Firefox, which is the second most popular web browser behind Internet Explorer (which belongs to Microsoft).
So the question is will the European Commission actually be able to stop Microsoft from being able to bundle its popular web browser with its operating system Windows or not? The impending decision is going to have a very large effect on the subsequent success of Microsoft and its Windows product on the whole.
Microsoft considering thousands of redundancies
Author: Tanya (13 Articles)
Hi I'm Tanya, head of Marketing and Promotions at Pixel Internet. I'll keep you informed regarding any special offers or promotions we may be running, along with exciting news about Pixel Internet.
blog Browser cheap domains cheapest hosting cheap hosting cheap web hosting domain registration domains ecommerce facebook firefox Google hosting IE Internet Marketing iphone Joomla latest news Locked Area Lite magento marketing Microsoft MySQL Online Marketing open source php php.ini php errors Rankings Search Engine Optimisation SEO SEO tutorials SERPS social media twitter web builder Web Design Web Development Web Hosting web hosting sale web hosting tutorials website hosting Windows Wordpress youtube
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck and Luke Morton requires Flash Player 9 or better.
Pixel Internet specialise in web hosting for the following Open Source software packages, many of which include 'one-click-installation' via your control panel!
Click on a link below for more information regarding these packages and what we can offer.
