[RRS]

As with the thread about social networks, please bear with me: I was born during the commie times in Eastern Europe, I had no economy/business class at high school (and when I got to the university we had such "useful" classes such as philosophy), so apparently I'm not ready for the modern world...
...or maybe it's because I think independently?

Last spring a media campaign promoting IE9 started in my country, I saw the TV spot (again) yesterday. This only reminded me old questions I never got answers to.

1. Why all this craze about Internet browsers, monopoly et all?
Nobody noticed that Windows also came with pre-installed simple text editor (Write/Wordpad) and that's monopolistic move as well? I don't recall any legal battle about that? How about media player, firewall etc. - there are stand-alone paid products for these functions offered by other companies, why no anti-Microsoft-monopoly shows regarding these?

2. Why invest zillions of $ in advertising a supplementary application for your OS that's available for free? Which competes with other browsers, also available for free, like Firefox? Today even Opera has free full version, none of these display, say, ads to generate revenue... so where's the money? Who gets more $ if Firefox takes over the IE - or vice versa?

Even before I tried to learn webdesign I hated the fact that we have so many browsers, so many standards...