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.

Comments

Let's hope for Media Player removal

[e6003]

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 :-/

Re:Let's hope for Media Player removal

[burns210]

It is media player or IE bundling that is the problem. it is the bootloader.... Make it illegal for MS to threaten price bumps to any OEM that allows a dual-boot option, make it illegal for MS to require OEMs to sell only windows, and make the OEM contracts that are now trade secrets(to hide from the public the stranglehold MS has on Dell, et al) to be publicly open... THEN require billions IN CASH along with restrictions on thier actions in the coming years....

also, a clause that says if you are caught rebraking something you are getting in trouble for, your fine will double immediately, and will continue doubling for every incident you are found guilty of.

Re:Let's hope for Media Player removal

[WNight]

Same here. I was browsing for game cracks at a LAN party (Diablo 2 won't work out of most burners - Blizzard's caring response is "Buy a new CD drive - not a burner") and I was easily navigating Russian crack sites, with nary a porn popup or anything. At the end I had an audience of three, all of whom were convinced I had some hacker-level popup blocker. Nope, just Mozilla. All three of them grabbed the copy I had and installed it that night.

They weren't anti-MS at all, and only peripherally knew of Linux, but none of them liked IE or Outlook. They just used it because it was there.

And yeah, that's why I support making Microsoft either un-bundle their software or install competitor's software, like Opera and Mozilla.

If they shipped installers they could install the selected package from CD (or the net) withouyt actually having to bloat the install with ten different browsers, etc. It would probably be the best method because they'd have to ship the OS without Media Player, not just Media Player and Real Player.

And making them pay fines will...?

[bc90021]

...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.

EURO vs USD

[savagedome]

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.

Re:MS DRM The Most Free (I know, I was shocked too

[alyandon]

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.

Re:Windows Open Source?

[werdy]

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.

Re:Windows Open Source?

[Lehk228]

already in the works... or at least an open source win NT compatable environment for device drivers and applications ReactOS

I'm sorry WM9 is NOT low quality.

[cybrthng]

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.

Re:Abuse for 10 years - 10% earnings of one year?

[SmilingBoy]

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.