Is bundling really the issue?

Microsoft Monitor today has an article about how bundling is still core to the Microsoft product strategy:

Bundling–and that’s a very unpopular word at Microsoft–is at the very core of the company’s current product strategy. Microsoft has always integrated technologies into Windows, and many bundled pieces brought consumers and businesses tremendous benefits. But as Microsoft’s dominance has grown, integration has been viewed by some regulators and trustbusters as an anti-competitive tactic, of Microsoft trying to leverage Windows into new markets or crush potential competitive threats to the operating system monopoly.

The issue I have with the Microsoft Monitor article is that it then goes on to link bundling with integration:

As integration increases, as Microsoft adds more features to Windows and Office that could eliminate existing revenue generating third-party products, I expect trustbusters to receive more complaints and so engage more investigations. I’m not alleging that Microsoft is overtly doing anything wrong. That determination is for the legal processes. I merely observe that with the focus of major antitrust cases against Microsoft being about bundling, at a time when the company is so focused on integration, more legal problems are likely than less.

For me, integration is a different issue to bundling. Bundling is when stuff is included and you may struggle to extract it. Integration is when things work together and deliver functionality to each other. I expect, even demand, Microsoft software (and any other vendor) to integrate. I don’t want to use an environment which has a set of silo application that don’t know each other exists. For me the real anti-trust issue is whether Microsoft does the integration in such a way that others are excluded, or whether bundling is done in such a way that it can’t be removed. I’m not sure that bundling is actually the right word for these issues though, I think that the right word is actually amalgamation. The issue being that capability is cemented into something, using up my resources without me wanting it, excluding me from using something else and not allowing me to remove it. But that is where I’m actually slightly schizophrenic, because I do want packages of capability, but I don’t want bloat, I want things delivered in easy to apply clumps, but I want choice. I want a full meal, but I also want pick-and-mix.

Perhaps the meal analogy is a good one. If the meal doesn’t include the right ingredients we don’t buy it. Sometimes we want full say over the ingredients, and pay for the privilege (a-la-carte); sometimes we want cheap and fast and just don’t eat the bits we don’t like (gherkins in burgers) sometimes we want something in the middle. It’s  a balancing act. We always want a fully cooked meal (integration), we want a reasonable amount of food (bundling), we don’t want a whole weeks food in one go (amalgamation). I’m probably pushing the analogy beyond breaking point here, but sometimes that’s fun.

Microsoft’s challenge, therefore, is to achieve integration and bundling at a level that doesn’t result in wholesale amalgamation.