Year 11 students have just completed work on monopolies and the role of the competition authorities. The behaviour of Microsoft was raised more than once! 'Bundling' has been an issue that has vexed competition authorities in the EU and the US - giving away products free with Microsoft's operating system. The argument has been that Microsoft has restricted competition unfairly by given away products for free as part of Windows - taking advantage of its monopoly of operating systems.Think about what you are using to read this blog. My bet is that most of you, like me, are using Explorer. Why are you using it? Because it's free and it came with your PC. Now think about other firms producing brower products. How do you compete against a free product? How do you break into this market?
The EU competition commission has reached a prelimary conclusion to these
questions:
questions:
Microsoft's tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice
4 comments:
How do you compete against IE? A useful exercise might be to look at the strategies of Firefox and Google etc.
See: http://efbusinesseconomics.blogspot.com/
chris
Thanks for this Chris. Competition does exist, of course, and IE's market share has been declining. Would anyone like to take up Chris' challenge and explain the strategies used?
Chris, I looked on your blog but couldn't easily find a link - can you help pin down the relevant blog?
Hi
The specific post is here:
http://efbusinesseconomics.blogspot.com/2009/01/homework-business-studies_17.html
Homework posts in general are here:
http://efbusinesseconomics.blogspot.com/search/label/Homework
The first student response (she is from Taiwan):
http://fantiasv.blogspot.com/2009/01/is-internet-explorer-monopoly.html
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