Surprisingly, Microsoft canceled the Windows 7 E (for Europe) edition. Instead Microsoft will ship the same Windows 7 edition in Europe as anywhere else.

Microsoft was forced to add a “E” edition, because the European cartel office did not allow Windows 7 to ship with a pre-installed Internet Explorer. To avoid all the trouble with the cartel office, Microsoft decided to ship Windows 7 without IE8 in Europe.
They have now reversed this and are going to ship the same edition everywhere. Is the cartel office going to be any trouble for Microsoft now? No, they added a Web-browser ballot that allows users to select different browsers:

Web-Browser Ballot

In my humble opinion this was a bad act. As much as I dislike the Internet Explorer (well we all do, except maybe those who do not know better), I predict that this is going to hurt Microsoft in it’s ongoing battle with Google. When people have a choice to select other web browsers many people will eventually switch to other browsers. In the long run this means Bing will loose *a lot* of traffic. Without traffic Bing won’t be able to compete with Google.

Microsoft’s search engine “Bing” is quite successful. It is delivering high-quality results quickly and is usually more accurate and “up to date” than Google.

Off-topic about Google:

Google with all those anti-over-optimization algorithms gives way too much kudos to outdated websites and sites with high Pagerank. Most people say Pagerank doesn’t matter,  but it still means a lot. Without Pagerank you will simply never rank as high as high-PR site with a certain age. Google gives a boost to new sites, but new sites rarely show up on the first page.

Luckily, Microsoft teamed up with Yahoo to boost Bing:

The Microsoft-Yahoo Deal

More info about the Microsoft-Yahoo Deal

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