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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.
Meanwhile, Sir William was polishing his diamond swords. They will be distributed among his army of 10,000 lawyers, for nobody shall be permitted to defeat the knight of computer software.
Do you like German cars?
Activate "Operation European Freedom" immediately.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
Rubbish.
The EU isn't afraid of fining European Companies. You just have to look in to Car manufacturers, i.e., BMW, Volkwagan etc.
Plenty of these firms have been fined *heavily* for anti competitive practices and price fixing.
If MS was a European Company, it wouldn't be let off the hook, as it would be seen to be crushing other EU software companies as well...
It doesn't matter wether or not media player or ie are bundled or not. It has been my experience that the only reason people use these things is because they don't know any better. Absolutely everybody I have shown Firebird has switched. Some even thank me, almost as if I saved their lives. A single ad campaign for Mozilla Firebird will destroy Internet Explorer. People just have to be told it exists. Same for winamp 5. If you show people that it can do more than media player ever could they'll switch because it is better. I really hope that mplayer for windows actually works soon though. That will be the best.
Microsoft has done much worse things like preventing the sale of naked PCs (do that, and your OEM licence discounts miraculously shrink), embracing and extending everything from Java to HTML and, of course, spreading FUD left right and centre about anything that might threaten Bill's plans for world domination. These are the issues the EU should be focusing on, not whether they bundle a Windows app that plays MP3s.
Oh yeah, and Bill gives loads of money to charity, but there are more tax-efficient ways of giving to charity than overpaying for mediocre software.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Probably not. I think that the best we can hope for is MS being required to publish the file (e.g.: Word or Access) formats and make them available, at little or no cost, for interoperability.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Gates is getting a knighthood for contributions to international business while at the same time the EU (therefore by extension the UK) is fining microsoft for anti-competitive practices. Don't you just love irony?
Why can't we have define fines as a proportion of the defendant's wealth or income or something, so that they hurt everybody just as much regardless of how rich they are?
The EU can fine for an amount of 10% of the earnings within eu countries. Nintendo was once fined $600M for uncompetitive behaviour. How much do you think they can fine microsoft?
> The EU can fine for an amount of 10% of the earnings within eu countries.
> Nintendo was once fined $600M for uncompetitive behaviour. How much do you think
> they can fine microsoft?
10% of the earnings.
Depends on what is meant by "bundeling". Just having an app installed by default is not a bad idea -- even most linux distros come with konqueror/xmms/etc as default apps.
I would also like *more* integration of such apps into standard components (like kpart does): Audio + Video-Preview in a file manager is cool, being able to integrate "foreign" document-snippets into master-documents (like MS OLE does it) also makes sense.
BUT: to make this A GOOD THING this would have to be done using OPEN STANDARDS for data formats and component interfaces. That is, all information needed to replace ANY standard component of the OS should be available to the public. (i don't say it has to be open source, i'm not a purist)
HOWEVER, Microsofts way of "integrating" and "bundeling" things seems more like welding the stuff in so it can't be changed at all, which is EVIL.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
You know I find it interesting that any post that is even slightly anti-*nix and pro-windows gets modded down within a few seconds of posting. People like Windows. If they didn't, they wouldn't buy it. People want a computer to do things for them and not have to do things for their computer. Microsoft provided the masses a way to do this, albeit for a high cost (cash and security).
No, a modern operating SYSTEM does not contain a media player.
A modern operating ENVIRONMENT contains a media player.
That is, was, and in all probability ever shall be Microsoft's blind spot - that the operating SYSTEM is not the operating ENVIRONMENT.
The environment should have a media player, an email client, file management utilities, a calendar, games, HTML renderer, screen savers, contact managers, diagnostics, and many other things.
The operating SYSTEM should NOT!
www.eFax.com are spammers
No, they won't. They simply use it because it is there, its the default app, and does the job, however horribly, that they need. 'Most' users, anyway.
OTOH, if YOU install it for them, and make it the default, they will happily use it and learn its features.
Unfortunately, even installing the simplest of software still scares the crap out of a lot of people. Or even saving a copy of a document to a floppy disk instead of in their My Documents folder is totally over their head.
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
Europe isn't a borg collective. There are people who have difference opinions. Believe me, more people than not don't like Gates in England. Just because the Queen has given away a KBE doesn't mean that everyone's falling over themselves to grovel at his feet.
As I recall, the US government wasn't particularly harsh on Microsoft. Does that mean all USians adore their products?
In fact, the fine is capped at 10% of the undertaking's total worldwide turnover in the previous year. So, the fine could be a maximum of $3,500,000,000.
"Could this be the start of an open source Windows version?"
Probably not. I think that the best we can hope for is MS being required to publish the file (e.g.: Word or Access) formats and make them available, at little or no cost, for interoperability.
That would actually be worse than the current situation. As things are now, reverse engineered MS formats can be used for GPL projects. If Microsoft releases the file formats but charges a license, even $1, for usage of these formats, it will be incompatable with the GPL and we will be unable to use their formats AT ALL. In fact this seems to be what they are doing with the FAT file system.
Notethe part: It will also be necessary to take account of the effective economic capacity of offenders to cause significant damage to other operators - in particular consumers - and to set the fine at a level which ensures that it has a sufficiently deterrent effect.
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You know what I would like to see ... is that Microsoft just pull all copies out of all of Europe and then let Europe experience the horror of trying to use Linux. Sure Linux is good for us nerds, but lets see how much of an uprise there is when the internet market in Europe takes a dive because the mom and pop shops can no longer use the ineternet to place orders and mom and dad can no longer buy their goods off line because they can't figure out how to launch the internet browser.
Creating a good OS isn't hard. Look at BeOS. If Microsoft did pull out all it's copies from Europe, then there'd be a race to see who could fill the gap in the market. Capitalism, you see, when not abused by monopolies, responds well to situations like that. People could use OSX, or a few billion could be thrown toward Linux, and the problem would be solved. The only difficulty is lock-in. If you remove that, Microsoft wouldn't stand too much of a chance. Look at IE compared to Firebird. Clearly the latter is superior, but the former is more widely used. Why? Because Microsoft bundles it in.
You guys all have Microsoft to thanks for the advancement of the internet on the masses and if you think anything else you are crazy and blind. The internet would still be something that is used in the back of corporations down in the basement if it wasn't for Microsoft giving everybody a PC that they could easily use.
This is the same Microsoft that missed the whole start of the home internet revolution? If Microsoft wasn't around, that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be easy-to-use PCs. Hell, there's always Macs, even if you can't accept the possibility that other companies and individuals can design OSes much better than Microsoft can.
Unfortunately that's not always true.....
I've tried to "help" several people who compain about IE crashing, popups, etc, by telling them to use Firebird. It's amazing but I usually hear "I tried it and it worked fine but I don't like it, how can I fix IE."
You can lead a fool to Firebird but you can't make them browse or something.
Because Media Player and IE themselves are just frontends. They are just wrappers that make calls to system services. In Media Player's case, it's DirectShow, in IE's it's the MSHTML engine. Well ripping these out of the OS is a bad idea since many things depend on them. To remove DirectShow is to break all pro A/V software, alternative media players that use it (such as Media Player Classic), many games, and so on.
Remember: Windows isn't Linux and 99.9% of users don't want it to be. Linux is defined as nothing but a kernel, what you put from there is up to you. So you can have Linux systems with totally different UI's libraries and so on. This is fine for geeks, but frustrating for normal users since you have no gaurentee that you have the dependencies you need (and have to go track them down and download).
Windows (and MacOS, and Solaris, and many others) are defined as not just the kernel, but other associated services and such. It is expected that Windows will have it's GUI, it's HTML rendering and such. It's all part of the OS. While this may be frustrating to geeks, it's precisely what normal users want. They don't want to have a program say "sorry, but I can't run until you download X and Y and Z libraries and get them running on your system". They just want it to run.
I tried this installing firebird on my parent's PC. They ended up on some sites which were only accessible to internet explorer, so they concluded that Firebird doesn't work. This was enough for them to switch back.
Did you explain to them why it didn't work? Non-techie's need to be educated in terms that they can relate to, and I find the association of computers to cars to be a very simple way of making that comparison. So when you tell that that the reason Firebird didn't work isn't because the car is broken, but instead it's because the road was intentionally made for specific cars to use and will cause non-equipped cars to crash, they may begin to understand.
If enough people start making layperson comparisons like this and can complain loudly enough, we might get somewhere. But if the average computer user simply caves into whatever works, it doesn't matter whether it is a piece of crap or if the competing product is the greatest thing since sliced bread -- people will instinctively use the easiest tool to accomplish something as possible, and IE fits that bill. If the converse were true, we'd have turbine engines in cars and Betamax would never have lost to VHS.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
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.