It's hard to know where to start with this one. I'm not sure if it's the CTO, the company he represents, or the site he chose to publish his opinion on. But it all stinks from what I can tell.
If there was a functioning market for web browsers and operating systems, the past few weeks would have seen two announcements from Microsoft. After a firestorm of criticism from the web design community about Internet Explorer 8's misguided mode switching proposal, Redmond would have publicly backed down. Second, Microsoft would have bowed to 90,000 users demanding that Windows XP continue to be sold.
There were no such announcements. Why? Because Microsoft, with its dominating position in the web browser and operating system markets, acts like a monopoly.
A monopoly doesn't have to consider its customers' wants or needs. In a functioning market, vendors must consider such things in order to compete successfully. But the market isn't functioning.
See, I disagree. The market is, in fact, functioning. What's not "functioning" is Opera, and to find the blame for that, I guess we'd have to point a collective finger at the author of this diatribe. The reason we know the market is functioning is that IE continues to lose market share to Mozilla Firefox, and in huge ways in certain countries. (Especially in Europe, go figure.) And in the past year, another major competitor, Apple, has entered the market with its own Windows Web browser. This hardly seems like a market caught in the deadly grip of a monopolist, sorry.
I could go on about companies abusing antitrust laws in order to further their own corporate needs. But heck, that should be obvious to almost anyone. Except, possibly, the Register (always seeking to be controversial) and Opera (unable to compete). Sorry, but that's how I see this one.