"None of them actually charge for the browser? It's free!"
...and more retarded comments from the economically clueless.
Sometimes I fear that I understand people who grab UZIs and go postal.
Anyways, the actual issue is about "standards" here - seems that this somehow was distilled into the browser/mediaplayer brouhaha, covering up the real problem.
As long as Microsoft is not forced to open up its protocol its file format descriptions FREE OF CHARGE AND WITH NO PATENT OR COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS WHATSOVER TO ANYONE in a well-documented fashion, allows independent implementation of the same by third parties and refrains from abusing its market position by subverting standardization commitees (see the MS ODF farce) and by extending and embracing or maybe just "interpreting" existing protocols ("this page optimized for IE") -- we are not getting anywhere.
Once that happens, MS should be able to ship anything it wants with its OS as competition will again be about performance and feature set and not warped due to legal lock-out by an arbitrary monopoly. "Play nice or not at all" has been an accusation leveled at MS since at least 1998.
And "opening up" does not mean being able to see MS source code under an NDA so that one has to reverse-engineer whatever Redmond pumps out only to find that an implementation is covered by some MS patent as it actually involves a kludgy mapping from XML to an MS-extended version of ASN.1 or something.