An interesting thing that I would normally just pass over happened to me a couple of days ago: I was talking about Windows Media Player with a friend of mine, and when I told him he should upgrade to the new version 11, he did not know that Microsoft made it, and as such asked where he could download it.

While this didn’t strike me as odd at all for a start, in hindsight it really was quite interesting. This person, who is very computer literate and intelligent, took no notice that Windows Media Player came bundled with Windows XP, and used it based purely on its media merits. To me, this seems to completely oppose what was trying to be proven in the 2004 European Union anti-trust lawsuit that resulted in the creation of Windows XP N (a version of Windows XP without Windows Media Player bundled).

In this suit, it was ruled that Microsoft “…broke European Union competition law by leveraging its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems onto the market for… media players,” [link] and by including Windows Media Player with the operating system it did not encourage users to make their own choice in a media player. Here is a regular user, one that probably has more knowledge than most (and an avid music listener at that), that made a complete and free choice of media player.

I’m not a lawyer, this is just some food for thought. Just because a piece of software is there, doesn’t mean that a user will not seek alternatives.