Dear Brussels, You Are Fighting Last Century’s Battles

While everyone else has turned their attention to mobile, European regulators have remained doggedly focused on making sure consumers have plenty of choice of browsers when they bother to boot up their desktop. The issue seemed passe when the EU revisited it back in 2009 and seems all the more so four years later.

Windows and Internet Explorer have continued to lose share over those four years on the desktop itself, and the real growth in the Internet is from billions of mobile devices. To be fair, Microsoft did agree to offer European consumers the option of a ballot to choose which browser they wanted. Even Redmond admits it made a mistake. “We take full responsibility for the technical error that caused this problem and have apologized for it,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We provided the (European) Commission with a complete and candid assessment of the situation, and we have taken steps to strengthen our software development and other processes to help avoid this mistake — or anything similar — in the future.” But, at this point, might regulators want to turn their attention elsewhere?
Consumers certainly have.