The upgrade option was not available, Microsoft said, because it was trying to comply with European competition regulations. This means that IE is not onboard Windows 7 in Europe.

BBC NEWS Windows 7 pricing gets unveiled

The Windows 7/Internet Explorer unbundling malarky is an utterly confusing tangle.

What seems to be happening here is that Microsoft, having been ordered not to ship IE with Windows in Europe, are denying customers a smooth upgrade path (which would, apparently, entail removing IE from the user’s system, and then asking them which browser they wanted to use. Or something like that.) I think this is a tactical move to irritate people. Bear in mind that Internet Explorer is not absent in Windows 7 at all; the Trident engine and JScript libraries are shared components of Windows (just as WebKit is on Mac OSX) and are used by all number of first and third party applications. At most, all that’s removed, or hidden, is the Internet Explorer executable.

The self-install consumers are a bit of a distraction though. They make up a tiny, miniscule subset of the number of people obtaining Windows 7. For most users, they don’t get Windows 7 from Microsoft; Microsoft provide new copies of Windows to OEMs, and Windows reaches the consumer preloaded on some new hardware. The OEMs are supposed to choose which browser to put on the system by default. They will, I’m certain, all choose to install Internet Explorer.

This ‘default browser’ thing is one area where the PC sales market is a complicated mess, and where a comparison with Apple actually kind-of works:

Consider all computer hardware manufacturers as equals for a moment: Apple, Dell, HP and Gateway are all in direct competition, at least from the perspective of Dell, HP and Gateway.

Apple differentiates itself in the personal computer market in a number of ways, but one of the important ways is in the curation of the user experience.

In simple comparison, the functionality of the software bundled with a Mac maps to that of a Windows PC: There’s an operating system, a mail client, a web browser, a photo manager, a music player. Every Windows PC ships with these tools, too. Apple, as a computer manufacturer, ships a different set of software from other computers. That they build the software themselves themselves is not so relevant here, the point is that they select software to ship with their computers for the purpose of providing their users a better user experience.

Compare to Dell. At the root, their motivation should be the same as Apple: Ship the best possible user experience to their users, so that customers value ‘buying a Dell’.

But, they don’t. They ship the same software over and over because they dare not impose change on their users. They have been shipping what Microsoft provides them in the Windows bundle for a generation, and have never exerted control over the experience of ‘using a Dell’ over ‘using a Compaq’ or ‘using a Gateway’.

In the PC world, the manufactures are incredibly weak, and they’ve cemented their weakness.

Shipping alternate browsers doesn’t require a piece of European Union legislation, it requires a manufacture to take control of the user experience of their machine and curate the software they ship. They could have installed Firefox or Opera on their Windows images and set it as the default. They could have advertised “tabbed web pages” and “virus free browsing” as features of buying their machine. They didn’t.

In the past, I’ve understood that Microsoft offered financial incentive to manufacturers to favour IE and Windows Media Player in their distributions, or even inconvenienced licensing to those who wanted to ship alternates. That’s certainly anti-competitive and if not already illegal, seems like a more useful focus of legislation.

The core problem remains though, that the manufacturers do not curate. They bundle software through partnerships and are paid to include time-limited trials of substandard and often duplicitous applications. Dell charge their customers to not have that software included.

The culture of PC manufacture is not going to embrace this chance to ship Firefox, or Opera, or Safari. If they wanted to curate the experience they would already do it.

Instead, they’re going to do what’s easiest and cheapest. That means they’re going to take their fresh, Internet Explorer-less Windows image, install IE8 on it, and ship that to their customers. Because their customers know Internet Explorer, and shipping what they know will result in less support calls for assistance with web browsing.

This is why the user experience of the PC is so appalling: An entire industry of manufacturers offloaded their complete user-experience to the third-party provider of their operating system. Now they’re at a point where that provider, Microsoft, is misfiring and producing poor software. The manufacturers don’t know how to improve the user experience to their customers, let alone be in a position implement and support it. There’s a lot more to providing a great computing experience than swapping the ‘Blue E’ for a ‘Red O’. Via: BBC.