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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."
For those who won't RTF 7 page MS response, here's my "flaimbait" quote from Microsoft's response.
All other contemporary operating systems, such as Apple's OS X, similarly tout their integrated media capabilities. The Decision expressly rejects (Para. 822) the principle that tying analysis for finished products should focus not on whether there exists a separate demand for a component but on whether there is any demand for the finished product with that component missing. For example, the fact that there is a market for shoelaces does not mean there is a market for shoes that have their laces missing. Common sense dictates that it would be misguided for regulators to require shoes to be sold in such a manner, even if this would create greater opportunities for companies that sell shoelaces. 1 The Decision goes on to dismiss the fact that all other operating systems also come with media playback software, ostensibly because some (but not all) of these finished products incorporate media players developed by other suppliers. (Para. 822.)
Go ahead, mod me down for common sense ...
I would be appaled if they were forced to rip out media player. It's the #1 player used for streaming media. It's nice to rely on the fact that most people have this installed. The only other competitor, Real, brings only spyware-laden shit to the table. QuickTime is used by no one else commercially except for Apple themselves.
This would be very bad for the Internet.
Then why don't make the one without WMP as expensive (or more expensive even) as the one with and let the market sort it out?
Or would the EUC be so bold as to tell some company how their products should be priced?
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
President Ed Black wrote letters to Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, telling them he knew they had been asked to "take extraordinary actions" because of the European decision.
Black urged them not to intervene. He said Microsoft was pressuring the U.S. government to pressure the European Union to ease off Microsoft.
Am I the only European here scared by this snipet from the Reuters article? Are we going to be bombed? Colin Powell is involved, next will it be Rumsfeld? What kind of excuse will he find this time?
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
And really, MFC gets a bit of a bad rap. Sure, Document/View is horrible, but other parts of MFC are pretty well done. That, and one thing MS has done pretty well is release a good IDE. It's mostly consistent, and yeah, .NET IDE is drastically different at first, but it took me about 5 minutes to get it to behave like VC 6.
Now please just don't get me started on the clusterf*ck known as COM/DCOM or the abomination that is .NET... both of which make me glad I switched to Linux 3 years ago at home.
Maybe... but recent steps of Microsoft seem to prove it tries to head in the right direction. Giving up remaining a monopoly at all costs, cost of customer comfort being not the least, and finding a decent, wide niche in the OS market, as one of many, competing with others, but often cooperating too, accepting better solutions than their own without trying to cripple them (see Java VM, crippled Quicktime, forced integration of seriously inferior MSIE 3.x). It seems Microsoft noticed their destruction may be a completely unintended side effect of Linux growth if they don't stop being so evil, and just like IBM who was seen an evil empire, but nowadays is quite liked, Microsoft may try to do the Good Things because even if they don't pay in short term, as direct marketing profit, they will pay in long term, improving their reputation?
Several more kicks in the ass, just like the WMP case definitely help getting there. You might want to see Microsoft destroyed, sure. But would you really mind seeing Microsoft just becoming true Good Guys?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Actually, no they don't HAVE to take on a greater responsiblity; as they have shown all along. But if the market is going to get better instead of worse then they must be forced to.
Real use to be such a superior product until they thought that Microsoft was going to buy them out.
Right. Mac users have customer loyalty; they suffer through bad software because they love the hardware, or bad hardware because they love the software.
Windows users, more often than not, do it out of ignorance that there are alternatives, even *better*, or at least sufficient, than their existing solution.
GPL Deconstructed
Independent of the question if DRM is good or bad, I don't see why it should be tied to a certain encoding format. Why not put a DRM scheme on top of the encoding (which would allow content providers to choose encoding format and DRM scheme independently)?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Open Source has not to be free as in beer. I would already be glad if there would be any reasonable business apps available for small-to-medium businesses on Linux, commercial or otherwise. Currently you either can get very limited systems for personal finances or small businesses, or very large ones like SAP which are fine if you are Bank of America, but not for a small company. The midrange sector currently is more or less missing for Linux.
I even think that for-pay Open Source might be a great advantage for smaller companies entering the field as it would reduce the fears of potential customers that this new and small company will be gone tomorrow and with them all support for their software and all means to adapt the software and fix it.
> I have been working with, for, and around small companies (25 employees) for years and almost all of them are running some flavor of windows/windows server because ....
With the exception of 2 multi-national phb-fests, I have done the same. Oddly enough my experience has been the opposite. Just to be fair, my current gig consists of 2 employees: me and another guy who has a clue, I guess.
> Bob from accounting knows about computers and knows how to fix issues if they come up.
Yes, and you end up with 'fixes' appropriate to 'Bob from accountaing.' I can recall one of these 'experts' rebooting our ftp server because 'it wasn't responding' and it's how he 'fixes' his computer. Then again, after watching fsck do it's work, 'expert' realized the network cable wasn't plugged in.....
> These companies do not have the budget for a full time system administrator
Again, my experience has been the opposite. And also again, to be fair, it hasn't always been full time sysadmin, but at least a primary individual responsible for these duties. Contrasting our 2 expereinces, maybe I've just had better luck finding organizations who realize they 'get what they pay for.'
Ads are broken.
How is that ironic?
Microsoft is a monopoly and they've just said so. It would probably be MORE ironic if they WEREN'T using Windows.
[insert witty comment here]
Let's say Apple ruled the domain. Everyone ran on Apple's hardware, ran OSX, etc. Would everyone start treating them like they treat Microsoft?
/.'ers have toward Microsoft truly due to their business practices, or simply because they dominate the market?
I guess where I am going is... is the hatred
> Then your computers must be from some magical fairy land where patches never come out, new versions of XXX are never released and users never break anything.
Oh Jesus! That made me laugh really hard. I remember trying to show a new website to a manager once. The site was coded with XHTML and CSS. He was running IE 5.0 at the time; this was about a month ago. I guess up until that point, he thought his system was running perfectly, too. And he was wrong. When he pulled up the site to look at it, the CSS didn't show up so all he could see was the basic web page -- and he got hopping mad about it; asking why we spent so much money developing it. He basically shot first and forgot to ask questions later. He's the manager nobody likes very much, so I guess IT just kept skipping his office upgrades, as punishment. When I updated his system, he asked what I did with the old crappy site because he wanted to show someone how much money we wasted. He liked the *new* site though.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
How did Microsoft come to dominate the market, if not through their business practices? They got big not necessarily by being better, but also by kneecapping those who did better with system "improvements" which happened to break their implementations. (see also "anti-competetive practices.")
Would people treat Apple as bad as Microsoft if they were as big as Microsoft? Maybe not quite as bad. It'd be close, anyway. Sure, they user experience would be better (for most, anyway), but Big Apple'd probably still keep their architecture closed, and given their history of litigating against people who try to copy their look, their legal department would eventually need their own zip code. For that alone, people would come to despise them even moreso than now.
In any case, there would be many happy and complacent with the leader, even if that company were chaired by Satan himself. At a dinner out a few years ago, my father voiced the opinion that the world should standardize on Windows. (Hint: he's old and doesn't want to learn anything else)
And then some are just never satisfied with the leader. Some like buying cars, fully loaded, off the showroom floor and tooling around in them the same day. Others like assembling the parts themselves. For those who like getting into their boxen up to their elbows and rewriting parts of the operating systems to fill their need, there would still be a need for Linux.
It also bears mentioning that if Big Apple is anything like Current Apple, they'd probably be finessing and romancing Linux instead of using FUD. Except where Linux copied Apple's looks, in which case in go those damned lawyers again! So Big Apple's business practices would earn them a few less brickbats, that's all.
And as for your other question:
Sadly, some /.'ers hate anything that isn't Linux.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Did WMP8 really have the auto upgrade feature? I thought that was new in the 9 release.
My recollection is that Real Player appeared years before Windows Media Player. In fact, when it was first released it was the only streaming media player in the marketplace.
Real's original strategy was to give away Player so they could sell their streaming servers. Too bad that wasn't a very good business plan, but don't blame that on Microsoft.
FWIW, I use Mozilla for browsing but WMP to play streaming media. I, too, got tired of jumping through all Real's hoops just to get a free player. I have similar feelings to those expressed by other posters here about the "upgrade to Pro?" popups in QuickTime.
Contrast this situation with that of Adobe Acrobat. They, too, give away Reader to encourage content creators to buy the Acrobat production products, and it looks to me like they've been very successful. Of course, the fact that people need to exchange documents more than they need to view streaming media, and the fact that Acrobat costs a couple hundred bucks, not thousands like the streaming servers Real sells, may have something to do with this.
You act like this place is full of Microsoft "apologists," when the majority of the readers are rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth radicals who think everything should be free.
In case you haven't noticed, Slashdot is full of 'foaming-at-the-mouth' loons from both sides of the aisle. The difference between the two groups is minor, even trivial; they both want everyone else to think the same lock-step, ask-no-questions, vomit-the-party-line way that they do, and view any opposition to their blather as heresy. The actual argument is irrelevant when it comes to fanatics; they're all the same animal, all looking to impose their morally/intellectually superior view on everyone else.
Fanatics are the bane of civilized society. Fanatics oppose freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of action. Fanatics are little would-be tin-pot dictators whose most cherished goal is to gain power over everyone else around them. The actual point of contention is is just a means to achieve this; it's the fanaticism itself, and the imposition of it on everyone else, that's the real goal.
So we have groups like this:
- MS is evil. Down with Satan!
- I worship Bill Gates! I dream of blowing him!
And like this:
- Open source = communism! Communists suck!
- Open source is divine writ!
Not to mention this:
- monopoly capitalism and corporate oligarchy are they greatest economic systems on the planet! I know, 'cuz I'm so smart and cool I'm going to be in the inner circle someday - I just know it!
- socialism is the only way to go! For the 'greater good'. Which is defined by my own morally superior self, of course. Bow down before me, you ignorant, capitalist swine!
And like this:
- Free software is anti-capitalist!
- All software should be free! Kill the capitalist pigs!
And, of course, this:
- The RIAA/MPAA are the Holy Church! Kill the piratical, thieving infidels! Oh, and ignore the fact that copyright violation is neither piracy nor theft, we'll be sure to buy enough Congressmen to change that soon enough!
- information wants to be freeeeee! Unless it's my credit card number, and social security number, and my email password, and, um, forget that, at least it wants to be free when I'm downloading music that I'm going to keep and have no intention of ever buying!
Fanatics, one and all. Filthy little vermin who take great joy in trying to make the vast majority of us moderates miserable - because how else can you tell whether or not you have power over someone, unless you make them miserable?
Would that we could sterilize them all at birth. Or at least conduct some post-natal abortions.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?