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MS May Be Forced To Sell Stripped-Down OS In EU
An anonymous reader submits "According to this article at Infoworld, Microsoft may be forced to sell a stripped-down version of Windows in the EU as a result of antitrust rulings, unless a settlement is reached during the next month to six weeks." (See this post from last week for more background on the EU's antitrust proceedings.)
Would this be the 99 cent Diet Coke I've heard so much about?
True story.
Microsoft may be forced to sell a stripped-down version of Windows in the EU
Why just the EU? Why can't we all have access to the stripped down version?
apple is not a convicted monopolist.
when you are a convicted monopolist. the rules suddenly change.
so dont bother with those comparisons, they just dont work
M$ can strip this out, that out and have a million different versions.
But in the end windows 2000 + XP nowadays really only differ by a few registry keys. Some programs can do the magic for you. Cough.... NTswitcher.... Cough.
Bill said it's *impossible* to do that, since extra crap like web browsers are an *integral* part of the operating system (I wonder how they made operating systems before web browsers were invented). If they do this, does it mean it suddenly and miraculously became possible?
Will they sell it in other countries, or to customers who want it? Back during the Netscape/IE fiasco, I read one of Microsoft's supporters say "customers must buy what is sold to them, not what they want". Uh huh. Right now Linux has exactly what I want, and I don't even have to pay for it. Beat that, MS!
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Microsoft has argued that unbundling Media Player from Windows would prevent the operating system from working properly.
really? didn't know an operating system needed a media player to work correctly.
unless for some reason other applications integrated wmp, in which case offering wmp as a seperate download is just as good. it annoys me when they make such dubious claims.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
The stripped down version will suck but will be available. Unless the EU wants to force them to not ship a full version in the EU at all, OEMs in the EU will just *elect* to use the full version. They probably won't want to ship an OS that lacks basic functionality that users have come to expect.
Some guys stripped out all the crap that was loaded onto Windows 98 and all of a sudden, it because a pretty damn good OS.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
Back in the day when Netscrape was making noise about Internet Exploder being bundled with windows, Microsoft just integrated Exploder into the interface so that at one point it became "neccesary". So now windows users basicly use a web browser to navigate their files on their own hard drives.
I predict that a future version of windows will integrate sound and video into the interface. Making Media Player the new file-navigator, with animated talking program icons or some such.
Probably will call it WindowsMediaExplorer.
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.
No, the difference is that having a monopoly means you control a significant share of the market...which apple does not :)
--Thei Antispamist A useless endevor that will cer
In my opinion, I think it mostly means that if you have a default player installed, you should have the ability of removing it. Unless I am wrong, Internet Explorer and Win Media Player are two examples of software that are not "removable". This is the difference. It is possible to remove notepad in Windows.
DrkBr
I highly doubt this is a slippery slope, and the analogy with Apple is misleading.
In the article it states that many media content companies are making files and movies available only in Windows Media Formats, because its the only Media player they know thats going to be on the system. Since a overwhelming of desktops use Windows, this is amounting to the fact that the market tends towards using Windows Media, and thus whats the point of getting other formats/players?
The commission is hoping to open up the media player market a little, only to allow more competition and "a fair go" for other media players/formats. People still have the choice of getting Windows Media with the OS, so this isn't really hurting anyone, just allowing for a free market.
On the issue of interoperability, there was this little gem-
Bolkestein warned that ordering Microsoft to reveal code, which is protected by copyright, and to a lesser extent by patents, could make the Commission vulnerable to a legal challenge by the company at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
Im quite unclear on Bolkestein's motivation for that comment. Opening up the code to allow interoperability will not take away the fact that the code is Microsoft's, so Copyright is preserved. The commission isn't (as far as I can tell) letting competitor's simply copy MS's code so they can interoperate, but rather allow the code to be shown so they can code their own products to allow cleaner interoperability with MS's code. Any since patents are required to be published anyway, and need to be licenced, the patent comments is a non sequitur.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
It's too bad that it takes the EC in order to bring about the possibility of these changes. I know it's not the same system [insert pro-America comment here], but aren't these the type of things that the United States should be fighting for?
;>
Monti may also demand that Microsoft itself should propose "within a few months of a ruling" what Windows computer code it should reveal in order to make the operating system fully interoperable with rival software makers' programs for servers
Long overdue in my opinion, Microsoft is bundling way too much s&*^ together these days. They've built their entire market strategy around this idea; Just try to ask your Microsoft rep about any one product. The conversation may start with InfoPath, Sharepoint, Office, whatever, but will undoubtedly end up with discussions on Server 2003, MS SQL, Exchange, Commerce Server, ad infinitum until you have seen every single, poorly designed intertwined product they own. The truth is, Microsoft is right - their products only work well with each other.
I already have the source code anyway
Last August the Commission told Microsoft that its practice of bundling Media Player into Windows amounted to an abuse of the operating system's dominant position because it placed rival music and video players at a disadvantage.
Since I have never opened Media Player on my Windows box, I have no idea what sense Microsoft's position makes... Although their crowd control, err DRM, may not work properly.
Why would it suck?
Say all the article is accurate and all they are taking out is IE, WMP, ms messenger and outlook express... for each of these programs there are better alternatives out there that are free.
IE = Firefox
WMP = Mplayer (w32 binary is available) for movies, winamp for audio
ms messenger = gaim
outlook express = thunderbird
Why just the EU? Why can't we all have access to the stripped down version?
Because if you can't handle a one second shot of a bare nipple during the Super Bowl halftime show then I don't think you're ready for a stripped down anything.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Umm there is a hell of difference between being a market leader and being a company convicted of abusing their monopoly position.
With one you can assume a reasonbly level playing field with the other the playing field has been tilted only to the advantage of the convicted company.
All of these antitrust "remedies" miss the mark completely. Bundling software into Windows is only one anticompetitive tactic and it isn't even the most important one. It is amusing in a watch-a-train-wreck way to watch them kill categories of software. AV vendors are about to feel the pinch. But then, we've been bitching at MS forever to beef up their security.
Besides as given categories of software become ubiqitous people start expecting more things to come with the OS. MS would probably have to bundle a browser and a media player even if destroying Netscape and Real weren't on their minds at all. Now they need to bundle a firewall and an AV scanner to protect the rest of the net from their own customers.
The true factors that give their monopoly power are secret OEM agreements and undocumented protocols and file formats. Breaking them up won't necessarily fix those and neither will dictating what MS can and can't ship with their OS. Take away the gun away from vendor's heads and document the formats and protocols. Their source code is not needed, wanted, or even particularly useful. It would have to be reverse engineered for those specs anyway.
Let us just imagine that the EU forces MS to sell a stripped down version of Windows. When the normal user gets home, plugs it in and fires it up, they are going to want applications to help them along.
First, IE has to come with the OS just so they can utilise the standard web browsing capability. To download new software they need to be able to get to the web sites, why would they download another browser if they already have one? If IE is not included, where are these people going to go to get their software? It will be like going back to the trumpet Winsock days.
Secondly, a fairly sizable number of web sites offering sound and video clips use WMP format files to deliver their content, the user will download WMP to be able to watch/listen.
The stripped down version of Windows has now become the full version through the wants of the user.
The only people who will buy the stripped down version of windows are probably the same people who use Linux/Mozilla/Thunderbird/OpenOffice, the only reason for them to change is to play games.
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
You seem to be missing the point that MS is a monopoly. When you are a monopoly you cannot use your OS monopoly to make your other products a monopoly.
For example. A media company wants to release some videos for download. What format do they pick? Windows Media. Why? Because they know that it will be on 90%+ of all user desktops. This gives MS an instant monopoly on a video format by just putting it in their OS. They didn't earn that monopoly, they leveraged one monopoly to get it. Now if MS were to include a competing format say, Quicktime or RealVideo in their OS, OR, make the wma format open, then no one would be able to complian since now people can choose the format they want based on merit and not the fact that it is what is included in the OS. When you are a monopoly, all your actions are watched closely to see if you are trying to tip the level of competition in your favor by leveraging your monopoly.
This does not apply to Apple since they have less then 3% of the desktop market, 0.1% less then Linux on the desktop infact. Apple's format is picked because of the quality, not because Apple is leveraging a monopoly.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
It reminds me of MS-DOS 6.21...
DOS 6.2 contained DoubleSpace which was ruled to have infringed on patents that were held by the maker of another drive-compression software called Stacker. As a result, Microsoft was required to release MS-DOS 6.21, a version that didn't contain DoubleSpace and had no other functional changes. What's more, they were also required to put out a step-up disk that'd upgrade 6.2 users to 6.21, all it did was delete the infinging program and upgrade command.com to report as the new version number, and price it at $10.
I remember seeing the step-up disk at Staples. It was in a small cardboard box with the front torn off, and the least attractive packing for a 1-disk program ever. No manual, just a small mailer-like wrapper around the individual disk. The store had only one box of 10 out, and it was shoved off to the side.
Microsoft didn't want to put this product out, nobody sane wanted to buy it... and it all showed.
BTW, the patent issue was later resolved in the typical Microsoft way. They settled the lawsuits by buying the company. MS-DOS 6.22 quickly came out, with the new patent-worry-free DriveSpace software, that did exactly the same thing DoubleSpace did with a few interface tweaks.
why? because of monopolism or market dominance? not likely. as of november 2003 the ipod was the leader in portable digital music player with... 31%.
less than a third.
oh yeah, i have a source for that number.
2 1337 4 u!
Theres nothing WRONG with Microsoft bundling in it's Media Player or Web Browser or whatever. Doing that is no different than them including Notepad.
The problem is when they use their monopoly of the operating system to pretty much require you to use their version of the software or when they use the monopoly to make their product inheirently better.
For example in windows if you go into the control panel and open up internet options will it configure your Mozilla browser? Can you setup your help file system to use a different default renderer for it's html files? Or my favorite your pretty much required to keep IE installed so you can use Windows Update to get the almost daily CRITICAL updates for their buggy software.
The media player isn't going to be quite the versatile system component that an HTML renderer is but there are still going to be a lot of applications that end up using it and they won't have much choice thanks to tie-ins like properitary windows media formats.
The sad thing is that Gates isn't lying when he says he's making this stuff a central part of the operating system. Clearly linux is following suit with it's own html renderers. The problem is that with Microsoft they never give the user any options to say "hey thanks for making html such an intergal part of my computing expierence now let me use X product instead of your sucky component please".
More to the point, you can get Quicktime for Windows but you can't get WMP for Mac.
Yes, you can...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
This brings up an interesting question... just what is an operating system?
Linux, in a pure techical state, is nothing but a kernel. A kernel alone is pretty useless, so that's why there's there's shells to provide an interface. There are multiple choices for windowing systems, multiple choices for basic word processors, multiple choices for just about everything...
Now, replacement shells for the WinNT kernel are possible... but Microsoft doesn't sell a release of Windows that doesn't contain a shell, which is why most everybody is using Explorer and there aren't too many other shells in circulation. So, most people think that Explorer is an intrinsic part of Windows, but in reality, you can live without it if you had another.
Isn't that the atomic level of an operating system? Wouldn't that be the true level Windows should be required to strip down to if it's going to be unbundled from all other software?
You can't? So what's this then?
Now to be really unpopular (and get modded as a troll, happens every time I state this opinion). In my opinion, as someone who spent 2 years working with DRM (yea yea, hiss boo, burn the heretic), Microsoft's DRM was more "open". They give their SDK away, no licensing fees. I spent the last year trying to get Apple to provide the iTunes DRM code. Doesn't happen. As a third party the only way to produce Apple DRM music is to give control over distribution, pricing, bitrate, marketing and everything else to Apple. Microsoft just give you the SDK and you run with it however you like.
You can use more then just Apple's media format on the Mac. You can even get Windows Media Player 9 for Mac OS X and RealOne for Mac OS X.
Apple does not have a monopoly of home computer users, Microsoft does. Most things MS "integrates" into their OS will become a monopoly simply because they have a monopoly on the home computer user market.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Notice how the consumers never entered this equation at all? Isn't it feasible that Joe User LIKES having an operating system that doesn't require him to go hunting all over the internet for simple things like media players and Instant messaging? My God, if they took out the browser the average computer illiterate wouldn't know what to do. Use an FTP client to get one? This is just a government mandate to protect competetitors that can't compete for various number of reasons.
You can argue all you want that it's because they have a monopoly but you'd be conveniently ignoring facts. Why do people use Windows XP? It's not relatively stable, but its stable enough for the average user and more importantly: It's user friendly. No Linux distro can compete with that level ease, and Apple is too expensive.
If you take out these components you're not only just pissing off Microsoft (which may be a laudable goal) but the millions of users who LOVE having everything in one nice package. But hey, at least that tiny minority of competetitors will get make some nice profit, right?
Make a significantly better product and communicate this to your target market. Do this, and you'll win. It happened with A & P Grocers (80% of the market was theirs, and they eventually went bankrupt for not responding to market trends) and it can happen with Microsoft. Don't hide behind litigation
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
Consider a rather odd but apt example that illustrates why. Suppose one company, Microcar, manufactured 90% of the cars in the world. Suppose that they were trying to dominate radio broadcasting by including in each of their cars a free radio that would only receive broadcasts that used their technology. Would it make any difference if the EU required them to sell cars with and without this free radio?
Of course it wouldn't. The radio is free, so customers would say, "Well, I might as well get the version with it." And Microcar would help that process along by hinting, using their usual FUD tactics, that the radio-free car wouldn't be quite as reliable. It could leave you stranded on some lonely mountain road.
There's only one solution that makes sense. Require Microsoft to work with competing technologies (Real and QuickTime) and ship with Windows versions of those technologies that are as stable and well-integrated as WMA.
If the EU isn't willing to do that, justifying it by Microsoft's monopoly position, then they should drop this issue and look the other way when Microsoft uses its OS dominance to crush their competition in this and other areas.
--Mike Perry
http://www.InklingBooks.com/
What? No Clippey? Damn!
Table-ized A.I.
But MSIE is not free, in either the libre or gratis sense. MS is on record the IE costs them over USD100M per year and the cost of that is built into the cost of the OS. Win XP should be $40 per pc cheaper, and then the user can be be free (libre) to choose whether they want MS media player or not.
Indeed, I'm typ
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Perhaps you would prefer to approach this from a different angle - Could you explain to me how giving away a browser benefitted Microsoft?
It allowed MS to control the defacto internet standards for a long time.. we're still in the process of getting away from that. How many sites do you see that still say "Best viewed with IE", and browsers that are actually adhering to W3C standards are being blocked?
That kind of lock-in means any possible competition is always playing catch-up. Not to mention gives MS huge leverage (which they used) against other standards, such as Java (hence why Sun sued), or in the market for selling server software ("IE works best with our software.. and everybody uses IE, so you should really get ours.")
But beyond this, it doesn't even matter. If IE was offered for free, but *not included* with the OS, Netscape wouldn't even have had arguing rights, because at that point MS would not have been leveraging monopoly status in one market (OS) to affect the business of another (Browser). However, they did, and that's where they crossed the line.
As for baseless generalizations, you also make one when you suggest that without MS we'd have a far worse mess. There's no proof of that, as the computing industry was already starting to realize the benefits of standardization, at least for interoperability, when MS came along.
From where I sit, MS's overwhelming monopoly actually hurt interoperability.. why? Because people didn't need to think about designing their programs for multiple systems.. they could just design for Windows and that was good enough.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
No it isn't vague or kneejerk. The citizens of the U.S. have decided that the public has an interest in seeing healthy competition, and has enacted laws that govern how companies compete. Those laws are designed to reign in monopolies when they've crossed the line. They are *supposed* to be restrictive, if they weren't they wouldn't be effective.
If you can't see that unbridled capitalism is not only not good for the public, but ultimately self-destructive, as one company gobbles up its smaller competitors until there is no competition whatsoever and the whole thing comes crashing down from its own weight (causing collateral damage on the way to imploding), then I guess the rules might look a little vague. That doesn't prove that they are vague mind you, only that you lack an education on the subject.
Right now MS is guilty as charged but not serving the sentence, due to a lax enforcement policy of the current pro-big business administration. If the antitrust laws were being enforced as designed, MS would be under a lot more scrutiny and greater sanctions.
The Europeans have their own laws and if MS wants to do business in Europe then it must obey the laws over there. We wouldn't expect anything less of a foreign company doing business in the U.S. would we?
And that is *precisely* what MS is doing. Does anyone think that IE would have like 90% market-penetration if not for the fact that MS uses it's monopoly in OSes to push it ?
Does anyone think that WMP would be used by something like 80% of all people for playing mp3s and watching divx-movies if not for the fact that MS uses it's powers as monopolist in order to push it ?
The thing which you refuse to face is that there *ARE* certain actions that are perfectly legal in ordinary bussiness, but which are illegal if done by a actor enjoying monopoly-status. And there are *reasons* for this. The main reason is that if we don't have such rules, monopolies have a tendency to grow;
MS has a monopoly in OSes for personal computers. Next they'll use that to gain a monopoly in web-browsers (some would argue they're already close to this.)(and no, before you start, monopoly does not mean there are no alternatives, only that you have a market-penetration so high that your actions completely dominate the market.)
Next they'll do the same for email, instant messaging and all other much-used internet-protocols. Then they'll use this to gain an advantage in the server-market. Afterall, it's somewhat easier to be the server if you own all the clients. You can "extend" the protocols in arbitrary ways and force all competitors to play catch-up for example.
Next, after you control the personal computers and the servers, you go after the hardware. Since you choose to support only a certain platform, makers of all other platforms are bust.
Next you go for mobile phones. And pdas. You argue that yours will always "work better" with the PC, logically enough since you control the PC.
And so on.
Monopolies are bad for consumers, they increase prices ("monopoly-rent"), and decrease choise, quality and speed of development.
They are also bad for the economy. People pay "rent" to the monopolist instead of using the money to develop truly new products or to truly improve the existing ones.
Thus, it makes sense to have rules to regulate the powers of monopolies.
It's the good old opt-in vs opt-out argument.
I personally see no special problem in an OS coming without a browser, without a mediaplayer, mail reader etc.
I personally think all these items atleast should not be installed by default, but installed if the user opts to do so during the installation.
They could also do it the way SuSE does: Default, Default with office, Custom, Minimal. There you go.
If they'd done that instead of making it part of the OS from 98 onwards, and allowed OEM/VAR's to install other mail, browser and media app's then this wouldn't have become a problem. But they choose to leverage their monopoly instead of competing - probably because they knew their products weren't the best (well it is true that IE 5 was the best browser around when it surfaced - it didn't take long for it to loose it's throne though, and it never did take it back).
I don't see why anyone can defend the status quo since it does harm competition, it does stiffle innovation and it does hurt us, the users/consumers.
A) Linux is not a monopoly
B) All Linux-distros have more than one media-player to choose from
C) All the media-players that come with Linux are in fact made by third-parties
D) You are not forced to install a media-player if you do not want one
E) If you do install a media-player, uninstalling it is easy
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
1.Remove any references to MSN (so they cant push their MSN internet service or e.g. MSN search .NET binaries etc etc). Ditto for all their "secret" APIs (such as apis in MSHTML.DLL, SHELL32.DLL, SHLWAPI.DLL, SHDOCVW.DLL, SHFOLDER.DLL, WININET.DLL, COMCTL32.DLL, ADVAPI32.DLL, JSCRIPT.DLL, VBSCRIPT.DLL, .NET runtime, .NET libraries, DirectX, Media Player libs and whatever else) .NET to attack mono)
2.Make MSN messenger something that you can choose to install or choose not to install (i.e. if you dont want it, you can choose not to install it and install another messenger or no messenger at all)
3.Completly open up the Windows Media Player codec layer such that anyone can write WMP codecs and anyone can use those codecs in their app (making it so that e.g. games can use the codecs for displaying full-screen video clips or playing game audio would be a nice thing also, I dont know if its already possible or not)
4.Detatch the Windows Media Player UI from windows and from the codecs and make it an optional install.
5.Force microsoft to have one OEM price and one OEM contract. Anyone that wants windows OEM can buy at the same price (as long as they are bundling with a PC, they qualify for OEM price).
6.MS not able to dictate what OEMs can/cant do.
For example, let OEMs install whatever they want alongside windows (i.e. Linux, Mozilla or whatever else)
7.Publish all the communications protocols used by anything that comes on the windows CD under a clear "anyone can use this with no restrictions" licence. Also, publish all of their various data storage formats under the same sort of licence (e.g. NTFS filesystem specs, MS office document formats, MS media files, regular and HTML help document files,
That way, anyone can talk to/use their HTML renderer, internet DLLs and whatever else.
Also, it would (presumably) allow one to write a new HTML renderer (e.g. based on gecko) that could replace the MS one.
8.Force MS to unbundle Outlook Express, publish all the data formats that OE uses to store stuff, etc etc etc. (so that other mail programs can be used instead if you want to)
8.Force MS to completly implement the current W3C standards for HTML, XML and such. This includes complete support for ALL parts of formats like PNG
9.MS not allowed to use patents to protect their monopoly in the OS space (for example, cant use patents on
and 10.MS not allowed to use influence to try and spread products inside EU (e.g. applying pressure to governments/corps who are trying to decide between windows and linux)
These are all important but the most important IMO is point 7 (i.e. the "open all their secrets" thing) since that will level the playingfield as far as competitors go.
For example, Mozilla will be able to talk MS server authentication on all platforms, with no licence conditions or strings attatched.
And things like Linux and ReactOS will have full information to be able to read NTFS file systems.
And so on.
Apple doesn't *have* a monopoly.
As far as I can tell, you have Sculley to thank for that. According to this anecdote from a key Mac developer, Jobs wanted to sell the original Mac for about $1500 (up from his original target of $500, incidentally). It was Sculley who decided to charge the outrageous price of $2500, thus establishing the Mac tradition of paying WAY too much for relatively run-of-the-mill hardware.
And if they're willing to price-rape you while they're still just a single-digit market-share player, I imagine they wouldn't hesitate to stick it to you if they actually had influence to bring to bear.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005