The lawsuit was by the EU, not Opera.
False. Opera filed the initial complaint with the EU Commission. You can believe me or you can believe
their own press release on the matter. The EU Commission investigated Opera's claim and began legal proceedings against Microsoft.
The motives of Opera are irrelevant in this situation - illegal is illegal.
The notion that Microsoft violated any reasonable law simply by including a web browser with their operating system is absurd.
Opera is a leader in the mobile browser market and one of their assertions was that if they had been allowed to compete fairly they would have been in the PC browser market as well - and the EU agrees.
Opera has been around for over a decade, a longer period of time than Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, the reincarnation of Netscape, K-Meleon, the Webkit project, and numerous other browsers. The idea that the only thing holding Opera back from greater market share was Microsoft flies in the face of reality: Firefox, despite being many years younger than Opera, has nearly a 20% market share in Europe alone. Chrome has a greater market share. Safari has a greater market share. Opera is not the victim of anticompetitive behavior on the part of Microsoft: Opera is the victim of its own incompetence.
It is very telling that Opera had been around for years prior to the release of Firefox, yet Firefox is credited with re-igniting the browser wars. It is also very telling that Opera is attempting to litigate its way into market share, rather than competing its way into market share. I suppose it's fitting, since they've already failed in the open market, that they pull an Al Gore and attempt to litigate a desired result.
“The notion that Microsoft violated any reasonable law simply by including a web browser with their operating system is absurd.”
Actually the notion is not that ‘simply including a browser’ is a violation of law, but rather the collusion to exclude any others browsers being included by the OEMs. Otherwise MS could not satisfy the lawsuit with their browser ‘ballot’ screen.
And thank you for your well thought-out opinion on Opera’s competitiveness. But you know what they say - everybody has one.
Apparently the EU court differs with your legal opinion.