EU Releases Microsoft Antitrust Report

Hassman writes "Ever wondered the reasoning behind the EU fining Microsoft and ordering them to sell a Media Player free version of Windows? Well now you can stop wondering. If you aren't up for the full read (it is 302 pages), check out the Reuters summary. Want more? Check out a quote from the summary: 'There is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system [as in not Windows],' he [a MS exec] wrote Gates. 'It is this switching cost that has given customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO, our lack of a sexy version at times...' Mmm...sexy indeed." Reader BrerBear writes "News.com is reporting that the European Union has released its report on Microsoft's conduct, to which Microsoft has pre-emptively responded. Inside are more classic examples of what one should never write in an internal memo: 'In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago,' from Microsoft Sr. VP Bob Muglia."

Comments

Re:As a web streaming provider

[mr.capaneus]

It's nice to rely on the fact that most people have this installed.
Kinda like how it's nice to rely on the fact that everyone uses Internet Explorer. How irritating.

Sexy version, or sexy vision?

[JLyle]

"... our lack of a sexy version at times..." Mmm...sexy indeed.

Actually, Contorer's memo cited Microsoft's lack of a sexy vision, not lack of a sexy version. Although that is a funny slip-up for Reuters to make. The News.com story got the quote right.

Re:Win32 API

[kahei]

And really, MFC gets a bit of a bad rap. Sure, Document/View is horrible, but other parts of MFC are pretty well done

As someone who spent many years with MFC and has (or had) a huge skill investment in it -- you're wrong. Almost every single class is riddled with special cases, exceptions, bizarre hacks put in to maintain compatibility with earlier bugs... it's a classic example of an underengineered design that has required the most brutal and tortuous maintenance to keep going. Why, surely only someone with no ability to judge the elegance and utility of a system could say what you said!

the abomination that is .NET...

I was right!

Re:Common Sense ...

[RetroGeek]

OS/2 Warp, which was incredibly developer unfriendly

The GUI API for OS/2 was almost the same as the one for Windows. IBM and Microsoft started developing OS/2 together. In fact, the very early GUI for OS/2 (1.0?) was almost visually and functionally identical to the one that Microsoft used with Windows 1, 2, and 3. The API was so close that IBM had a conversion system (called Mirror??) where the vendor had top make a few changes, then could re-compile for OS/2. Of course the extra CPU time required for the conversion was a huge performance hit (think 386/33, 8M RAM), so it really never became mainstream.

What was developer unfriendly was the pricing of the NDK. Microsoft practically gave its NDK away, whereas IBM sold theres for big bucks (over $500 as I remember).

A worth reading

[Oscaro]

Contains some sweet snippets like this:

Microsoft states that more than 100 million copies of WMP 9 were downloaded in the ten months the software was available to the general public and specifies that these copies were downloaded by people who already had a version of Windows Media Player installed on their PCs. Microsoft concludes that these statistics rebuts the notion that consumers are unwilling to download a media player from the Internet if they already have one on their PC. But Microsoft states that the media player these users already [have] on their PC was WMP. This is important to note because Microsoft has implemented a mechanism in WMP by which WMP regularly looks for WMP upgrades on Microsoft's Web site (it 'phones home'), and in case it finds such an upgrade, prompts the user to download it. The users Microsoft refers to are thus likely to have been prompted to download WMP 9 (and repeatedly so if they chose not to do so at the first prompt).

Downloading a WMP upgrade in a situation where Microsoft recommends to do so via a recurring screen prompt is different from a situation where third party media player vendors whose players are not automatically present on each newly bought Windows PC have no possibility to prompt users to download their media player onto the PC for the first time. Only once the initial obstacle of the first download has been overcome will they also be able to rely on mechanisms which allow them to use screen prompts to offer the user downloads of upgrades.

Re:Actually...

[nelsonal]

That is precicly what this is about, everyone realizes that switching costs are high in software, and standardization is really nice for everyone involved. Having control of the standards is a very valuable thing, as you can collect some value from uses (as long as the value is lower than switching costs). The issue is whether MS used their Windows monopoly to extend standards they contol to other markets (in this case media players). That is illegal.

Re:Serious question...

[francium de neobie]

Not exactly

Despite the fact that Windows is more prone to things like viruses and malwares (which'd not be the case if it's not the dominant OS), its API is a pain in the ass to use compared to POSIX. Their Platform SDK documentation in MSDN isn't very useful either. Yes MSDN is big, but that's just because it includes a lot of useless information that you don't want. The Win32 APIs themselves look ugly compared to POSIX's. Say, for example, I want to do an mmap.

In Linux, it is:

void * mmap(void *start, size_t length, int prot , int flags, int fd, off_t offset);

Simple, elegant.

In Windows, the function calls stink just from the look of it. /* first */
HANDLE CreateFileMapping(
HANDLE hFile,
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpAttributes,
DWORD flProtect,
DWORD dwMaximumSizeHigh,
DWORD dwMaximumSizeLow,
LPCTSTR lpName
); /* then */
LPVOID MapViewOfFile(
HANDLE hFileMappingObject,
DWORD dwDesiredAccess,
DWORD dwFileOffsetHigh,
DWORD dwFileOffsetLow,
SIZE_T dwNumberOfBytesToMap
);

You see... I just want a pointer where I can access it as a file. In Windows I need to write more code, memorize more parameters and (just one in this example) data types just to do simple file mapping. In POSIX it's a breeze.

Re:Most people dont care

[hyphz]

By unbundling Media Player, users are *forced* to "care", because they'll have to manually install software to play media files with. If they "don't care", they'll never get to play anything.

It's true that markets aren't fair. But they *are* supposed to be "free markets". A market in which any new entrant has no chance of getting a foothold, and the factors causing that are 100% predictable/static, is not free. And non-free markets are very bad, because they screw up the core ideas of capitalism. Maybe not everyone can have a share of the money/market, but everyone should have a *chance* of doing so, not be frozen out by 100% predictable/static factors. Capitalism depends on some chaos and instability in the system.

MS is singled out for two reasons. First, because Windows is a monopoly. And second, because Windows maintains its monopoly, not by being good, by just being a monopoly. Windows has a monopoly because it supports a wide range of hardware, right? Nope, it's the other way round, Windows is a monopoly because hardware devices support *it*.