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Microsoft EU Monopoly Appeal Thrown Out
smnicoll writes "The European Court of First Instance has thrown out Microsoft's appeal to have penalties for the abuse of monopoly suspended, reports BBC News Online.
'Microsoft's application for interim measures is therefore dismissed in its entirety,'
The court's statement said. 'The evidence adduced by Microsoft is not sufficient to show that implementation of the remedies imposed by the Commission might cause serious and irreparable damage.' The commission's case is mainly focused on Microsoft's integration of Windows Media Player into the operationg system and the effects that has on the ability of Real Networks and Apple to get their rival players used." Similar stories at Bloomberg, CNET, and Reuters (via CNN).
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
If the eds had used my submitted write-up instead (mumble, mutter) then you'd have known that this is only the second-highest court in the EU. Although the ruling was pretty damning, it's still possible that MS will appeal to the European Court of Justice, who could overturn the decision. Fortunately, given the feeling everywhere else in Europe, this doesn't seem likely, but the air isn't completely clean yet.
BTW, if it stands, this is a hit against MS on two major counts: the original ruling required them to open up various information for interoperability purposes, and to produce a version of Windows without Media Player integrated.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yo might love it, but it wouldn't happen. 80% of EU trade is intra-eu now. Americans still seem to assume the EU "needs" america to act as a giant consumer for our overproduction. Strip away the economic language for a bit, and that comes down to the fiddling grasshopper arguing the ants need him.
While indeed, an isolationist america would damage our economy somewhat, the only way the Americans could truly "wreck" our economy in europe is by nuking us (at which point nasty european bioweapons would be released, so it's not a good idea).
I didn't "just start with a negative view of Microsoft". Many of the posters here, myself included, work in IT and have developed out negative view of Microsoft over many long years of service packs, software patches, virus outbreaks, crashes and downtime.
... ?
It is *our* view and we cherish it. Doesn't it ever surprise you that there aren't nearly as many opponents of Open Source? Wonder why that is
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
If people want windows with a media player thats fine. They can pay the probably very small (I'd imagine about £2) that a "with media player" copy of windows will be. Or downloaded it from Microsoft's website.
The point is, and the point that the European court has decided on, is that you CANNOT USE A MONOPOLY YOU ALREADY HAVE TO UNFAIRLY TRY TO GET ANOTHER ONE.
Repeat after me. Microsoft can give away or sell media player. What they can't do is use their monopoly on operating systems to aid them getting one in media players. Those are the rules you have to play by once you are in a monopoly position
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
Yeah, but mplayer is far superior to windows media player.
Often times some of my windows using friends will complain about download some crappy movie off of a p2p network and how the audio wasn't synched properly.
I'm always like... "don't you just use auto-sync? Or just hit the buttons that allow you to positive or negative delay the audio manually?"
And they're like, "Man what player do you use? That sounds awesome!"
And when I tell them they just say "Hmmpf, never heard of it."
Oh, and there's also VLC, which is quite good too. Although why you would ever want to watch a video clip while it's being distorted so it looks like it's a flag blowing in the wind, I don't know... but it's plug-in archtitecture is fabulous.
First time I used it I was watched one of those nasty HDTV clips ripped from an 1080i stream, so it was interlaced. I looked through the menus and found a de-interlacing plugin. Cool stuff, works great.
All much better than WMP and free!
No, since Apple is not a monopoly.
Only one of those operating systems is a monopoly. And antitrust-law says that using your monopoly in one area to gain monopoly in other areas is against the law. MS used their OS-monopoly to gain monopoly in web-browsers. Now they tried to gain monopoly in the streaming-media markets, by using their OS-monopoly. And that is against the law.
I find it really surprising that some people simply do not "get it".
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
You're an engineer, right ? :D
Better players exist today. They have more features, more codecs to choose from, run faster, etc. The problem is that most people just won't bother to go and download another movie player if they got one with the OS. So by MS bundling the media player with the OS the create an incentive for sites _producing_ media to use their format. This opens a revenue stream to Microsoft that would not be available to them if people did not have WMP on their machines.
This is exactly what happened with IE vs Netscape. Microsoft have a monopoly on the desktop, so when the desktop had IE on it, why bother going to look for Netscape? And that's why when MS bundle something, it's different than when Red Hat or Apple bundle something - Microsoft have an effective monopoly in one area (desktop computing)
You can't win this fight by innovation alone. You could write the best media player in the world, but then you'd also have to give away the streaming servers, technical support, etc. And you have to market all of that to the content producers / hosts. That all costs money. Do you have a couple of mill to blow 'innovating'?
I can't see anything wrong in a government or coalition of governments determining what and what is not allowed in their jurisdiction, that is surely the main things governments do.
Companies don't have any inalienable rights, they have the rights given to them by the law and it is down to Microsofts violation of those laws that it is in the situation it's in now.
The EU has recognised the problem Microsoft is causing in the market and unlike the US is taking practical steps to repair and mitigate the damage caused.
It's not that hard to switch, especially if you don't have any other choice. Taking the hardass stance of "you can't tell us what to do because we own you" would be the WORST thing MS can do. There are viable alternatives, they're just less attractive because of the effort MS puts into suppressing them. The linux desktop may not (and this is subjective, of course) compare with WinXP yet but it beats the hell out of Win NT and Win 95 and people used those happily for years. Microsoft would lose the entire European market, would face signifigant pressure from US based companies with EU presences and would generally get a bad mark for making itself look like an ass in front of the whole world. I'm sure in his pissier moments Bill has considered it. I'm equally sure that he knows he'd lose hardcore if he did.
I don't consider Microsoft to be a monopoly, because no law forces you to use their OS.
Similarly Standard Oil was not a monopoly because you could go refine oil yourself, or use whale fat. Heck you did not need to use oil at all, just make a torch.
Name me one other company that sells operating systems and makes a profit on it. Apple makes it's money on the hardware. So does Sun. IBM makes it on services and hardware. RedHat makes money on services. All of these companies will sell you an OS, but none of them could survive in business trying to sell OSs.
You argue that intel had a monopoly on computer chips, which is wrong, but lets assume they did. What markets did they leverage with that monopoly? Did they give away free RAM with their CPUs? Did they give away free anything?
Monopolies occur when a market is cornered. MS owns the OS space. No one else can make money selling OSs, even when the product is better. OS2 was arguably better. BeOS, and Next were both far better. If Apple sold OS X for X86 today, Microsoft would stomp them, despite OS X being better in the opinion of pretty much everyone I know who has tried it. The reason is that MS controls all the sales channels, they have massive influence on all software developers, and they have piles of money gained from their illegal business practices that they can use to bribe and buy out anyone they want. Linux is the ultimate proof of MS's monopoly. When your strongest competitor is a free product produced by people in their spare time, outside of the normal business channels (and people are willing to work long hours for free to have an alternative) then the market is broken and capitalism has failed.
Why is it that nobody ever thinks it is possible to have a biased, negative opinion of something for a reason? Why is it that people assume that the bias came first, and apparently from nowhere?
Yes, I have a negative view of Microsoft. How did I get it? By using their software, and paying attention to their business practices! It's not like I woke up one day from a troubled sleep and cried "Microsoft is teh suck! From now on I will believe this truth without paying attention to what they do!" Um, no. I payed attention to what they do, and thus I think they are 'teh suck'. I couldn't stand Microsoft well before Linux was even on my radar.
Oh, and if you think it all goes back to MS stealing Mac's code and nothing else, you haven't been paying attention yourself. It's funny how often people who don't understand someone else's bias also don't understand the history that produced that bias. "Gee, why is everyone so down on facism, you're just biased. Huh? What's World War II?"
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