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RealNetworks Sues Microsoft Over Antitrust Issues
jamacdon writes "Yahoo! has an article about RealNetworks Inc. filing an antitrust suit against Microsoft, claiming that MS has violated antitrust laws. This claim appears to revolve around how PC makers are restricted from including competing media players. Very similiar to the Internet Explorer issue, but different content. Will the results be the same?"
Maybe, but the situations are different. Real Media is still very much alive, while Netscape was pretty much dead in the Windows world when the anti-trust lawsuit finally was decided.
Netscape had the perfect case against Microsoft: "we'll cut off their air supply." What came of that? MS was found guilty, but the govt. decided not to do anything about it. How do you go up against that?
If Real didn't make their player so goddamn intrusive when it comes to computer use, I'd be happy to support them on this. I cannot stand the fact that whenever I launch the RealOne player, it puts its advertisement programme into the background, and I have to kill it and remove it out of the registry to from stop it from starting up whenever I login.
Microsoft is in the wrong in this situation, but Real is worse by selling personal information, having a player that eats more than its fair share of needed memory, and including what may be spyware with its software. If this were Apple and Quicktime, I'd be more willing to go and support them on this.
I don't know but given the speed of our court system, Microsoft's vast resources and the inventible appeals, I'd say we'll find out in about 5 - 7 years.
How are Real's formats any more proprietary than Microsoft's?
RealPlayer still competes with Windows Media Player over common formats like MPEG and MP3.
This lawsuit is crap. This is not like the browser wars where microsoft took on netscape and used it's power to crush them. Real player is just some bad proprietary format that people don't like. The audio was bad and the video was horrible. They never took off because no one distributed their formats because of choice. And I remember on old windows versions how microsoft included real player, but then since no one wants it anymore, no one cares that it's gone.
I'd like to see where they could come up with "billions of dollars of damages" on a free player. What, they were going to rake in billions from their expensive encoders and streaming software? Real's out because of divx, mpeg, and quicktime, not microsoft.
And how many times have people here gone through the task of removing the real player? I think of it as the original spyware, tough to kill. You couldn't pay me to put it on my computer.
How is this insightful? What exactly does the nature of Real media have to do with Microsoft's strong-arm tactics to exclude competing players using leverage of WinOS?
I dislike Real Player for many reasons, but the open/closed nature of their media has absolutely nothing to do with how it's distributed.
In other words, Media Player has an unfair advantage because it ships with Windows. Well, duh. But now the government should protect RealPlayer because it is not installed with Windows?
Well, um, yes.
This wouldn't be an issue if Windows wasn't such a huge percentage of the market. But what anti-trust consists of is using market leverage against competitors in a manner that they can't compete with.
Fact is, MS would be able to happily carry on with behavior like this if Linux and MacOS grabbed a bunch of market share. Give them each, say, 20%, and bundling non-OS-related products with Windows is no longer an antitrust issue. But as long as the market is such that you have a hard time getting around having Windows, then it is unfair competition for MS to bundle other products with it.
And you're right, that Real needs to improve their quality, or winning the suit still won't improve their sales... but back when Netscape was still better than IE, I knew a lot of people who liked NS better but "didn't bother" because they already had IE. Then Netscape couldn't sell anything anymore, and then they started to suck.
Hm, maybe Real can convince a judge that *they* didn't suck until MS did this to them. It's conceivable... a long time ago I used RealPlayer without making a mess of my computer...
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Does it really seem realistic to expect Microsoft to not include a media player with Windows? Mac OS has come with Quicktime forever, and now includes iTunes. All of the Linux distros have come with a suite of multimedia applications for years. If anything, Windows Media Player shows that there IS competition out there, and that Microsoft is having to add new features to keep up. Tough shit for Real if that means having another competitor to help choke those last few death rattles out of Real's crap products.
Further, Windows Media Player is just an evolution and consolidation of the various CD/Wav/Video playing tools MS has been adding in including since the Windows 3.1 days, updated with newer codecs and a better UI. Windows is not cheap, and adding newer, better features is necessary for Microsoft to continue adding customers. Real never bitched back when the Windows multimedia stuff was a few different programs under "entertainment," and for them to say that Microsoft is violating antitrust laws now for providing something that consumers got used to a long time ago is just a load of crap.
Of course, I guess when you're running a company that's trying to make money selling that shitty RealOne player, you'll do anything to get the stock price up.