"Zero price to the consumer"
Is that why retail boxed versions cost $300 or more? You have to pay for everything, so the more stuff they put in, the more you pay.
Pretty soon, you'll be paying more for software than all of your hardware -- and mostly for junk you don't want. That's why I stopped upgrading at Win2k. I have no interest in Longhorn.
If the government really had ANY interest in solving this problem, they'd stop farting around with junk like bundling (which won't hold up in court, like it didn't with IE), and attack the real problem -- getting Microsoft to stop bullying hardware vendors to distribute Windows exclusively. Microsoft has every right to bundle their software in their own product line. They have no right to bully hardware vendors.
PC vendors should put their foot down and stop pre-loading their computers with Windows as default. There has to be a way they can get together to do that. Otherwise, all this court talk will achieve nothing.
