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EU's Mind 'made up' on Microsoft
Alain Williams writes "The BBC reports that Microsoft could soon be facing multi-billion euro fines and other sanctions for breaking European competition law.
The European Commission has finished drafting its decision in the case it brought against the software giant." Let's just hope that the EU can fine them cash and not accept Microsoft coupons like the US does. Clearly the best solution to an operating system monopoly is to give free copies of windows to school and eliminate the competition as early in the education process as possible.
I hope the EU goes through with the proposal to force MS to unbundle Media Player. It will be so great to watch them squirm if this happens: there's no technical reason why not (XP Embedded) and it will force their hand over the bundling of IE (again). A large fine will barely dent their $50b cash reserves :-/
...do what exactly? With US 52.8 billion dollars in the bank, even they take half that, they still have 26+ billion dollars. With profit margins of 25%, and revenue of 32 billion a quarter, those would have to be some hefty cash fines to even make the smallest dent in how MS does business.
Not to mention that Bill Gates could sell some of his stock if he wanted to, and put that money back in the company.
libertarianswag.com
With the Euro on the rise compared to USD, its going to eat a little more of that 50Billion USD pile that M$ is sitting on. Ouch.
Free XBox, PS2
Clearly the best solution to an operating system monopoly is to give free copies of windows to school and eliminate the competition as early in the education process as possible.
They're giving it away for free. Free is good, right? Or all of the sudden when it's Microsoft, free is bribery, isn't it?
This does mean that the school is urged to use Windows, because it would not be polite to not use it. For a school, however, Windows does come with many benefits, primarily ease-of-use. It is a much easier operating system to learn, for sure. I can't imagine middle schoolers using linux.... faaar too stupid.
webpage
That's because essentially all Windows players that support DRM utilize the MS supplied directshow API (and whatever codecs) to decode the content.
It's not too dissimilar to how applications that embed IE are using mshtml.dll. iexplore.exe (and explorer.exe) itself is nothing more than a thin wrapper application that loads mshtml.dll.
But who says Microsoft are just selling an operating system? They are selling the whole thing, applications and all. What is wrong with that? Why can't they sell what they like?
If other people want to sell alternative applications, then they need to make them better, or cheaper, or both. No-one is guaranteed that their business strategy will work.
If users don't look around for other software, then the producers of that other software are doing a bad marketing job.
Why should Microsoft advertise for their competitors?
Do you think that if I buy a car, it should come with no seats? That I should be forced to buy my own seats from elsewhere?
Who said anything about not ruling ourselves (apart for stupid scare-mongering tabloids)? and believe me, the minute we break off from the EU is the minute we stop outperforming the rest of the EU.
But I do agree, while I don't think the EU constitution is anything to worry about, if the EU did try to take away britains sovereignty I would be one of the first to go protest.
Hmmm... bundling apps with the OS. Well then I guess Redhat, Suse, *BSD, etc should only have the kernel in their distributions.
WWI and WWII marked the struggle for industrial supremecy around the world. Now we are get the beginning of another global battle. Digital supremecy. Who is going to win the war? No one can tell, but the war is brewing. History loves to repeat itself and those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Especially presidents who don't study history in school and can't even explain the significance of important wars throughout history. At least his father was educated and knowledgible about world affairs.
Windows is no more guilty of doing this than any number of Linux distros -- but the end user ought to have the ability to install or not install those bundled apps.
Regardless of whether Media Player is bundled with the OS, or considered a separate app, the vast majority of users will still have it installed as the only OS they will ever have is the one installed by the hardware vendor. I would guess that most desktop consumers simply want to pull the machine out of the box and see it work. Hooking in a monitor, keyboard, and mouse is pushing the envelope. If you also sent a set of CDs with the default apps necessary to view email, listen to a CD, etc..., there will probably be a lot of returns, and a shift to bundled vendors.
Off topic I know, but I'm sick of seeing this bull about Airbus - Boeing has been funded to produce items "In the national interest" for decades. Airbus funding _in the 70s_ was at least upfront. Airbus is winning at the moment because It is building aircraft the airlines want!
The EU is a much more unfront place to do business - unlike the US with it Trade sanctions (steel), trade supsidies and poor consumer protection (I like my beef hormone-free)
To drag this back ontopic...
MS is finding it harder to influence the decisions than they did in the US - new President - case was essencially dropped - After a GUILTY verdict! Unbelievable...
t.
If the punishments for breaking antitrust law in EU are so harsh, Microsoft should just comply and design a windows update that will uninstall what falls into the category of "bundled software", beginning with all the outlook patches and Windows Media Player. Someone above mentioned 10% of earnings, which sounds right, considering ALL the managers of recent Italian food giant Parmalat are sitting in jail, since the revelation of a $23bn hole in their balance sheet.
[Please sign here]
Sure they will publish them - then patent them so you still have to license them, and they loose no control. Nothing that has occurred or been proposed as a punishment for anti-completive behavior has made any difference except breaking them up. The MS culture is what drives this, and no directive will change that.
If someone wants to fix it, it would be simple, but MS wouldn't like it at all.
1. Allow MS to bundle and integrate anything they want into the operating system.
2. Require each and every exported function from any DLL, EXE, COM object or anything similar that can be called from outside of that compiled module to be publicly documented as part of the specification.
3. Create one or more third party (non-ms controlled) entities who control the Windows compatible logo certification program, basing their certification on the published API specs from MS.
4. Require MS to be, say, 98% or better compatible on any Windows O/S or product before it ships and allow any other company to certify with no MS input. If an MS product doesn't certify - it doesn't ship. This includes service packs.
5. Require MS to support their O/S even if third party components are installed in place of MS components provided the third party components are certified.
6. Treat failures to interoperate with certified third party products as MS compatibility certification failure - i.e. fix quickly, or stop ship until fixed.
The heights of genius are only measurable by the depths of stupidity
already in the works... or at least an open source win NT compatable environment for device drivers and applications ReactOS
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I just put Linux onto my kids' computers, dual booted with Windows. They choose the OS they want to use at startup.
;-)
:-)
I added a frozen bubble kde desktop icon manually to the eldest daughter's pc (using an editor) from my own machine, 'cos I was too lazy to walk 30 metres. When she tried to run it, I'd forgotten to change permissions, so it didn't start. I walked the 30m anyway, opened a terminal window, typed frozen-bubble and hit enter. Game on.
So, ten minutes later I go back to see how she's getting on. (Another 60m round trip, any more of this and I'll be fit again) Frozen bubble was running on hers, but it's now running on her sister's PC as well, on the next desk.
"How'd you do that?" I asked.
"I opened that yellow window and entered frozen-bubble," she says, with an air of 'You think I'm dumb or something?'
She's nine years old, the younger sister is six. Don't tell me kids can't learn to use computers. The six-year old regularly installs new CD-based games from her sister's collection. Now you know why they both got 80gb hard drives last week
On a related note, what's a good kid-friendly network game? And I don't mean doom
Cheers
Simon
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
MS and Gates has done far more damage than good to this industry
Very hard to measure. Because Windows was such a dominant part of the marketplace, the hardware platforms stabilized and became a "common" platform, something that Linux takes great advantage of in the x86 world, as much or more so than Windows itself (since Linux didn't have to pay at all to reap the benefits of an x86 common platform).
Because of platform standardization, we have graphics cards that are incredibly fast that do not cost a fortune, which they would have if there were no standard API (full OpenGL cards still cost a fortune - slimmed down OpenGL had to come about to compete with DirectX - at one time, most games were written in GLiDE or [Open]GL but have almost all switched).
Because of platform standardization, we have lots of hardware vendors make competing hardware instead of just a few companies making non-standard products (as it was back in the late 80s and early 90s). Again, something that Linux takes full advantage of with no/little cost. Because of platform standardization, it was easy to churn out commodity computers at low prices so that practically everyone in the USA and Europe now has an x86 PC in their home and they almost all use software that "talks" to everyone else's machine - again, very much unlike the computers up to the early 90s.
Maybe folks don't remember the 80s and early 90s. I remember them fondly as a computer geek. Computers were a wonder and there were as many platforms as there were leaves on a tree, each with its own special features and nuances that made each platform have a coolness factor and made you want to learn all the details.
However, software companies had to have large/huge investments in personnel and logistics to support the many platforms that were in existance and eventually, some of those less adopted platforms began to fall by the wayside because of the effort that it took to support it was not worth the amount of money that the company would make. There was little/no compatibility and every company that wanted to sell to a large market (and make some money in the process) was re-inventing the wheel in incompatible ways several times over to support all these platforms.
When IBM pushed their platform, companies enjoyed having to write and support only one product. Costs lowered, sales expanded as more people adopted that platform, and it was a self-feeding system. The more software you had, the more people adopted the platform, the more software could be written and distributed to a larger market. As Intel's mantra goes: hardware is nothing without software (ok, they kinda departed this on Itanium, but that's why the latest P4 can still run most, if not all, 8086/8088 code).
Because of the consolidation on basically a single commodity platform, even Linux (sure, Linux runs on a variety of platforms, but count the number of installations that are on x86 PCs as compared to any other non-embedded platform) has enjoyed the same benefit that all the other software companies have enjoyed - a very large number of common platforms on which to run.
Add this to the fact that some folks simply hate Microsoft and will run anything else other than Windows to do work or play and you have the fact that Linux exists and owes its popularity almost entirely to the Microsoft/Intel alliance.
You need to quite blowing smoke out your but. WM9 is a tremendously advanced and well designed codec.
You just have to know what your doing as the default encoding is 64kbps or 96kbps for music - you can always push it to 192k and get cd quality +.
WM9 is the only codec to reliably handle HDTV (1080P yes Progressive scan 1080 signal (thats 1920x1080 resolution). That is freely distributeable and easily licensed for commercial applications.
If you want proprietary get a Mac and Quicktime.
Cows in the EU get a subsidy equivilent to $250 per year from the EU. There are a billion people in the world that subsist on less than $200 a year.
Except the EU has been cutting farming subsidies, while the US has been raising them. And even more poignantly:
FARM SUBSIDY PER COW
EU: $803
USA: $1,057
JAPAN: $2,555
The EU's no angel, but then none of the post-industrial nations are.
The cap is indeed for the turnover over one year and not over the time of infringement. It is a hard cap presumably designed to prevent companies going bust. However, a fine will generally be much lower than this. Usually, the amount of the fine will be determined by the type of infringement, the severity of infringement, the length of infringement and the willingness to co-operate with the European Commission.
So explain to us why MS Office isn't part of the base OS? Seems to me the vast majority of Windows users rely on it and "just want their OS to work", so why isn't it there?
MS could easily release an installation program to just install the WMA / WMV codecs and DirectShow and whatever, but they don't. They deliberly force you to install the latest Media player. There is no technical reason for this interdependancy.
And what will happen (hopefully) is the EU will simply force them to provide seperate installtion of the backend dlls, and the front end apps.
Actually, the Pro versions of commercial Linux distros run you $60-$90. The Home versions of commercial Linux distros run you $0-$40. Example here is SuSE. SuSE Personal costs $35; $50 for the academic version; $80 or $90 for the Pro version (although Amazon lists it for $65).
According to Amazon, Windows XP Home upgrade is $100; XP Pro upgrade is $190; XP Home full is $190; XP Pro full is $270. ("List prices" are $100, $200, $200, $300, respectively.)
Finally, to see how badly you're getting screwed, remember that the end user will generally only get Windows with a new PC; the vendors spend $70 or so per copy of Windows (numbers here in the paragraph are from estimations I've heard around), and the Windows group's profit was 416 (or was it 450?) percent, despite the fact that it generally only sells through OEMs for highly discounted rates.
While true in FOSS [the developer may or may not have been paid by your distro], it's not true if they have to pay the developer. While also true in a monopoly situation (since they can charge what they want without impacting the quantity demanded much], if a normal business is paying developers for something, you're helping fund development, and the price would necessarily be less, since the developers have to be paid.
I'd write more, but I have to take a shower and grace my new laptop with Gentoo [can't wait until I can custom-order a PC with Linux reliably. Stupid vendors.]. :)
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Europe isn't a borg collective. There are people who have difference[sic] opinions.
And you have two World Wars to prove it!