With about 34% of the US smartphone market I'll take those odds any day. The probability is it's not an iDevice; two to one odds. Don't ever go to Vegas.

Niether has locked down the OS so that some APIs are only available to apps that pay a fee to the OS maker. Neither has support for the same number of applications that Windows does because after taking 90% of the desktop OS market then breaking the law to freeze out other players the market is broken broken broken. And just to be clear, this machine runs Windows, MacOS, and Linux because I'm a computer geek.

I guess I don't see how your comments are relevant to whether or not what MS is doing is legal or good for developers or consumers.

Apple extracts a minimal fee used just to cover costs because they can make up their money in hardware sales. Apple on the desktop does not prefer App store apps by limiting access to APIs based upon whether or not the developer paid a fee to Apple. Apple on mobile devices is not dominant in the industry such that ignoring that market means not having a viable market, so Apple can't jerk developers around as much or they just go to Android.

Lets see there are hardware manufacturers that are selling computers and tablets (Android seems to be doing well giving away the OS). There are software developers that want a good platform for development (and already plenty that contribute to Linux although not many from the gaming genre). The real problem is gaining momentum in a market completely dominated by a single monopoly. Maybe the convergence of the desktop and the tablet/phone market will upset this, but Windows 8 is MS's attempt to stop that from happening and make tablet/phone/desktop one market with one set of applications, controlled by MS and without any room for Linux as a real player.

Apps in the Mac App Store are not given access to APIs that applications loaded from the internet or from disks are not. With the Windows store, it is a requirement to pay MS if your application is going to have access to the APIs necessary to use the touchscreen interface, etc. with the native functionality. Additionally, Apple does not have any sort of undue influence on the desktop OS application market so vendors selling applications are not beholden to Apple. They can just say, "Apple, you make the OS for like 20% of our customers, screw you we're selling on DVD at Best Buy. If, however, MS restricts what you can do on Windows more than your competitors because they're selling through the Windows store and giving MS a cut, it's hard to tell MS to screw off and may become increasingly harder as tablets and hybrids take up larger shares of said customers (assuming the trend continues).

Windows 8's store is quite probably a violation of antitrust laws, but they're managing to break into grey area by locking it down only for "tablet" style apps. Here's how it works, Microsoft is doing exactly what Valve is doing but tying it to their existing desktop OS monopoly such that regardless of if Valve produces a better product for end users, Valve will still lose in the market. They way Microsoft is doing this is by making it impossible for end users to load "Metro" apps that use the tablet interface unless they are purchased through MS's built in store. This means while Steam can still sell apps that use the existing Windows UI, they won't be able to sell apps that work with the other half of of the UI APIs including touch screen capable apps and apps that target both touch screen and keyboard. This provides MS a huge advantage (and of course the Windows store is pre-installed just like IE) without being a direct violation of existing antitrust rulings.

The fun thing is, they can drag this out for years in the US courts because they previously defined the market in terms of desktop OS's and what MS is trying to do is simultaneously merge the desktop and tablet OS markets, while taking an action that is only legal if the markets are already the same. The EU will probably slap them down and may or may not take any sort of effective action before another market loses all competition.

True, but free competition in the market is a huge concern to us consumers as well. I like the innovation, lower prices, and better quality that comes from having multiple vendors competing for my business instead of being stuck with the one and only vendor that can treat me like crap and make me pay through the nose for the privilege.

That's the whole point here. None of these companies has a monopoly on Web video and they all have stakes in what protocols and formats are used. Apple wants something hardware supported to make their mobile devices have longer battery life. Google wants something that they can use across a large array of phones and that won't require them to re-encode the youtube library of video into multiple formats. Mozilla wants something that will let them avoid patent issues. MS and Apple both want something that can be wrapped in DRM to keep mainstream content providers on board.

So we can have protocol wars as we have for the last few years which divide the Web up into fiefdoms and cause lots of user headaches, none of which actually helps any of these companies, or they can try to collaborate and come up with a solution that will work for everyone and hopefully reduce the barrier between their respective solutions.

Why would they? Unless one of the players gains dominance, screwing with documentation or being incompatible just hurts that one company more than everyone else. Five years ago Adobe was betting on locking everyone into Flash and MS planned to leverage their desktop OS monopoly to force every to use WMA. Apple wanted nothing to do with either, even if it made them incompatible with the mainstream. Now, they all stand to gain by playing nice, for now.

"Final" is a modifier on "Firefox 16". "16" is a modifier on Firefox. The phrase you interpreted this as would have another comma ala: "Today Mozilla released the final version of Firefox, 16". The gods know there is plenty of crappy grammar in tech release notes and news articles about them, but this seems to be a case of proper punctuation misinterpreted by those who don't know it well enough.

Because together those companies create much of the software and hardware that is interpreting open web protocols and formats. This is hopefully a step towards recognizing that proprietary technologies that only work on one vendor's platform are detrimental rather than beneficial for lock in. Maybe the next time you notice browser C is interpreting that HTML tag differently than everyone else there will be a place to point to that the maker of browser C has their name up as a collaborator.

Google is free to make the best maps or best social network they can. No one is stifling innovation. The only thing they can't do is win in the market not by making the best product, but by tying it to a product that is dominant in a separate market. They can even integrate their maps or social network with their search provided they offer the same functionality to competing maps and social network service providers. How exactly does this prevent innovation in any way?

I do believe Google's search market share has already been legally recognized as dominant in the EU, not that there is really any doubt in anyone's mind. Nor do I think we are in gray area with regard to separation of the search and social network or mapping services markets. Sure there is plenty to argue, but I don't think either of those arguments will get Google anywhere. The real question is if they are actually favoring their own services in a meaningful way, which I have not seen anyone yet establish (with the exception of a few smaller instances over the last few years and which have been corrected).

In terms of markets and thus the law, absolutely. There are companies that sell each of those services and not the other.

That's not good enough. The point of antitrust law is to keep all markets competitive and driving innovation. For that to happen people have to be free to choose the best search engine for them and the best social network and the best maps, etc. It's not sufficient that they choose the best bundle of those together because it might mean that while we end up with real competition in one market, the other markets are abandoned by innovators because there is no realistic way a better product can win against something tied to the best search platform.

In the early days no one had monopoly influence on the market. Antitrust laws have been on the books since the 1800's without much change. If Google doesn't have lawyers and businessmen that understand them they should dissolve the company now as their incompetence is staggering. If Google did go ahead and leverage their influence in search, they knew what they were doing and deserve to be smacked down for it because they were breaking the law and hoping to lawyer their way out of it.

Car analogies rarely make any sense in terms of antitrust law unless you preface them with, "Imagine one car company gained global dominance over the market and there was no real competition in the auto industry anymore".

The complaint isn't that Google isn't being fair to alternate search providers. The argument is that Google is using their dominance in search to undermine competition in other markets where Google also competes (such as using their search to undermine competition in the social network market by unfairly favoring Google+ over Facebook in search ratings). The point I'm trying to make is that antitrust law almost always deals with multiple markets, the one monopolized and the one being undermined. If you're trying to make sense of it and you're only considering one market, you should probably read a little further because you haven't gotten there yet.