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E.U. Commission: More Antitrust Trouble For MS
Tidal Flame writes "According to Wired news, Microsoft appears to be in hot water over antitrust issues again. The European Commission says it will require Microsoft to 'share more proprietary information with its rivals' and 'uncouple' it's Media Player audiovisual software from the Windows operating system." iCoach points to this article at The Register covering the same.
Wait until the next version of Windows comes out. That way if there is a negative decision for MS, they won't really be selling the incriminated software anymore. Instead they will be selling other software that takes advantage of their monopoly in some other, but equally devious way.
Good luck to the EU on this one though...
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
The calculator and command prompt can be uninstalled. The Start button itself is not an application, so I won't comment on that. But Explorer, which provides the start button and desktop can be replaced. IE and the Media Player, however, can not be uninstalled. What's next is anything that is integrated which can not be uninstalled yet has competition.
Developers: We can use your help.
Please make Microsoft explain why they bought key OpenGL patents during 2002 just to jump off the OpenGL group the year after.
Please, force them to keep those patents open to the community for at least fifteen more years, or something like that.
Another important fact that is being overlooked is that although Microsoft has had antitrust troubles since 1997, they've also remained profitable every year since 1997 - very profitable. This EU thing isn't going to change that, the DOJ was the big threat and that's no longer an issue. Even if Microsoft has to provide some way to fully remove Windows Media Player and provide more information to others, it's not going to all of a sudden make them an unprofitable company.
MS will not be gone in your lifetime, no matter how much you wish it.
Yes, I think it does matter.
There are companies that prefer to buy commercially developed software with support, guarantees etc. At the moment products such as Samba do work but cannot give any guarantee since MSFT might break their reverse-engineered implementation at any time. Office-compatability is sketchy as well and you never know if any document can be opened with other software.
If a formal spec to the protocol/fileformat/API is available and it is 100% legal to implement products based on these specs, others can easier implement products that use the protocol and they can guarantee that it works.
Yes, which is why Jackson's remedy -- splitting the company up -- was the only one that made sense in the long run. Microsoft has never complied in any meaningful way with any lesser penalty, and there's no reason to believe they ever will.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
That depends on your definition of bundling. I bundling means that the option is available to be installed and uninstalled at the users whim, then Red Hat is bundling, and M$ is not.
However M$ has used its market & political clout to ensure that their software cannot be uninstalled. "Why?" you ask. The answer is obvious, to kill the competition. They produce a product that most end users will accept blindly and force distributers to use that product and not others. If it could be uninstalled, some companies might accually install another browser in its place.
Look at the transcripts from the Anti-trust suit over IE. Many major distributers (Compaq, Dell, etc.) were forced to remove Netscape as an installation option, or face the revocation of their license to install Windows on their systems. Micro$oft wouldn't do this if kind of marketing on a whim, and I don't think that they are doing it for tech support reasons.
Microsoft has a knowledgable grasp of consumer markets. The economy is driven by laziness. The key to dominance its to produce something difficult to remove and make it difficult to obtain alternatives.