MS vs AOL
Sarah L. points to an interesting BBC article about the Microsoft/AOL settlement. It notes, for example, that the $750M that MS has agreed to pay AOL isn't all that much compared to AOL's $26B debt and MS's $50B in the bank.
It also notes that AOL has now been given the right to "use Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser technology for seven years without paying a penny for it."
That's right: as punishment for giving away its browser for free and thereby squashing competition, MS is now being forced to . . . give away its browser for free to its biggest competitor, who will now presumably use that browser instead of the one they own. (This is an even better deal for MS than before, when they were punished for breaking laws by being told never to break laws again.)
And, as the article points out, MS letting AOL use IE for free might mean that AOL will shift away from RealAudio and QuickTime and toward MS's Windows Media system, thus extending MS's dominance into the audio and video areas.
(Aside: I've heard various people recently say that 95% of all browsers are IE. That may be true, I don't know; but the percentages of which browsers are used by a site's visitors can vary a great deal between sites. At SH at the moment, it appears to be (very roughly) more like 70% IE, about 10% NS and Mozilla, and the rest split among a bunch of lesser-known browsers, including about 1% Safari.)
The article goes on to talk about a still-pending anti-trust case in the EC, which might have a much more significant impact on MS. But I ain't holdin' my breath.
