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).

Comments

This is great!

[overturf]

Wow, it sure took them long enough. I can't believe the EU has been around for so long, just itching to prove their significance, without actually doing anything. They sure showed the dirty, nasty US though.

Integration

[liangzai]

Quicktime is tightly integrated with Mac OS X. Does this mean Apple has committed an equally horrible crime? I find it ludicrous that this is an issue, as long as you can install other players. I frequently use Windows Media Player on the Mac, and I guess people also frequently use Quicktime on Windows. As long as the two are mutually incompatible, this is going to continue to be the case.

In fact, most operating systems come with a bunch of integrated technologies. I fail to see why this is bad.

New! EU Windows: now without keyboard support!

[ajp]

In solidarity with our Airbus-flyin' brethren I'm gonna run right out and install Real Player (now with Spyware!) on every winbox that can stand the performance hit.

Re:Microsoft's "fix"

[timmyf2371]

Why should it be?

Customers can now pay for a crippled version of the operating system with no media playback facilities or they can pay exactly the same price for a version which contains the best media player available for the Windows Operating System (IMO, of course).

Alternatively, they can choose one of the many Linux or BSD distributions.

Re:[OT] Dev tools

[tomstdenis]

IDEs are lame. Sorry dude. I get syntax highlighting and multiple tabs with gedit. I get help from man and use multiple shells to help build. I don't need to buy a $950 suite so I can have tab completion and 12GB less disk space.

I suppose if you never want to learn how your development tools work and how to be more proficient with them an IDE is a great tool. Sadly most MSVC users I know don't know what makefile is let alone what nmake is.

And yes, I work on projects of significant complexity. I get around just fine without kdevelop or MSVC.

Also you missed a huge point. MSVC is LARGELY geared towards writing .net/MFC/etc code. Sure you CAN write portable C code with it but the support is largely not there [mostly because building things like GTK or whatever with non-standard tools is annoying]. Well that and Windows isn't POSIX.1 so many small things break [pthreads, sockets, etc...]

From my experience though [say from talking with RiM engineers] most people settle on Windows without really taking a tour through the alternatives. To quote RiM they stick with windows for their blackberry development because it "has advanced technologies".

Tom