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: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.