graeme_p - 8:27 am on Feb 22, 2010 (gmt 0)

Don't know if I could go that far. Microsoft have done a lot of bad, but they have also done a lot of good. Had Microsoft not been pushing the PC so hard, who knows if any other company would have been able to get the momentum going.

The market was exploding before MS were a major player. IBM would have entered the market without MS (they would have bought an OS from someone else). What MS did was get a contract from IBM that put them in a perfect position to ride on the market growth. The wave would have come without the surfer.

We might still be in the dark ages, with a computer being seen as a rare thing owned by a techie or a nerd.

Lots of people had home computers before MS got into OSes: Commodorie, Apple, Atari, Sinclair, Acorn etc.) Businesses too - Apple II had the first popular (I think first ever) spreadsheet (Visicalc) available for it.

Is the worst possible thing the Europeans could have ever done. All this is going to do is give MS a larger market share by selling more operating systems and getting people to default to IE by choice.

How? People will only see this screen if they have already bought Windows so it is not going to increase Windows sales. As long as less then 100% choose IE, it will be less than the proportion who get IE pre-installed (if something else is preinstalled by an OEM it looks like this screen will not appear).