2 ms·
Bundling stuff is an attempt to limit competition. Similar to making it difficult for others to manufacture things which work with your product (as non standard
by bluecalm 14y ago
Bundling stuff is an attempt to limit competition. Similar to making it difficult for others to manufacture things which work with your product (as non standard extenstions, parts etc.)
It's not a problem if it's easy to shop around but once you do it from dominant market position it becomes abuse.
Prime example is bundling cell phones with contracts in US. The world would be better place (well, at least for consumers) if that was banned.
If banning things leads to good outcomes it's one justification to make it a law. That's the way anti-monopoly laws came about.
- scholia 14y agoAgree completely about bundling and the mobile phone industry. However, the point of IE was that it wasn't a standalone browser but a set of components that could be used by many other applications. For example, Microsoft Office didn't need to have its own HTML rendering engine, but could use the same rendering object as IE.