"Credibility of your article nullified" - ad-hominem is irrelevant here.

To my mind, the article's main argument is that Google in the search market today is in the same position Microsoft was in the OS market in the 1990s (near monopoly of a critical technology). This by itself is not sufficient grounds for regulation, but if Google starts to leverage this monopoly to choke competition in related areas (as Microsoft did), then we have a problem. The article lists a couple of examples where Google might be doing this (mapping, real estate).

I don't think the evidence is sufficient to start talking about regulation, but the parallels to Microsoft aren't obviously false.

Defaults matter.

Since Apple also sells (and marks up) its own hardware, they get to distribute their margins however they like between hardware and software. Microsoft doesn't have that degree of freedom.

I think this is the wrong way to think about cable service pricing. The marginal cost of providing you with an additional channel of cable is essentially zero. The pricing here is completely demand-driven and is about segmenting the market (price discrimination). In this, cable service tier pricing is closer to pricing different versions of Windows (Home, Business, Premium, etc, which all have the same marginal cost) than it is to bundling discrete goods.

Once you see it that way, you'll see that what you're asking for is like asking for a cheaper version of Windows without wordpad or paint because you don't use those programs and you shouldn't subsidize all those wordpad and paint users. In fact, cable companies would love to do that since it allows them to price discriminate more finely, but they won't do it because people will complain about complexity the same way they complain about multiple versions of Windows. Tier-pricing is a happy medium.

What a ridiculous position! Everybody on Slashdot who's not a Google employee should be rooting for Microsoft to succeed. Competition is good, people!

This is the paradox of Linux: development occurs in a diverse, open 'bazaar' environment, but the user experience is very much 'cathedral'-like. Want to install an app? Must go through the 'one true source' (repository). Sure you can search through Freshmeat or even Sourceforge, but who has the patience (or the know-how) to mess around with tarballs and text config files?

Windows actually has a much more diverse, dynamic, even open user experience when it comes to installing software. A significant proportion of open-source apps are available for Windows, certainly big ones like Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. And the universe of closed-source Windows freeware is gigantic and varied, and dwarfs anything available for Linux through Freshmeat, etc.

Econ 101:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

In short, it allows you to charge a higher price to those willing to pay more without sacrificing sales to those only willing to pay less.