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Microsoft Won't Appeal EU Ruling
Ec|ipse writes "Microsoft has decided not to appeal the European court order to implement antitrust sanctions, Instead, Microsoft hopes to win their main appeal that they (Microsoft) had abused their software dominance."
Damn, good sportsmanship, of all the low-down-sneaky tactics. Without Microsoft's Euro antics what are we supposed to discuss!!! Gotta dig for more dirt on other things, maybe run that article about Will Eisner dying or something, man, this really cuts into /. material...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm no expert in the EU legal system, so I could be out to lunch here, but I don't think an appeal is just another chance to duke it out. Usually there have to be specific issues preserved and reopened on appeal, and I can't think of what those issues would be in such a decision. Does anyone know what their grounds for appeal would have been? The law student in me is deathly curious.
adam b.
I was kind of hoping they would release the API's to the 'public' rather than just those willing to pay the extortion fee.
Nice to see they are doing something, it's better than dragging it through the courts for years on end.
Seems like they might have something up their sleeve.
It would be nice to see them have to strip WMP and IE out of Windows, or at least preload Firefox and Opera on Windows along with IE. My friend just recently was ranting about "WHY in GODS NAME do I need to have Windows Media Player EMBEDDED into my server??"*
*Disclaimer: I've never used any Windows based servers, and I haven't used Windows period since 1999, so I don't know if you can pull WMP out or anything.
Slashdot sucks
As if Microsoft cares. They're happy to pay lawyer's fees if it saves them face. I think they must've recognized that in some way, they simply would not win and that their money is better-spent on some different campaign. Expect them to publicly play "oppressed victim of the EU" soon.
I'm currious here, who get the 497 million euro fine? The EU or charities or who?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
It's not hard for them to put out another release without WMP. They release newer OS CDs all the time, the latest boxes of XP on the shelves have SP2 integrated.
It will be interesting to see how many people choose to install WMP.
I am in no way condoning or approving MS business tactics. I am only judging the merits of the effectiveness of such strategies.
My own perspective is that a music/video utility should be bundled with all OS's but that WMP is evil because it is being used to promote Microsoft's proprietary sound and video formats. MS is again relying on thier tried and true tactics of "embrace and extend".
But since the EU "picked up" on this theme it is bettor for MS to be a little more "low key" with this strategy than be arogant about it. It seems MS is grown a little wiser since the AntiTrust trial in the USA (despite winning it).
I miss the Karma Whores.
"...if it saves them face"
No, if it saves them market share. It should be pretty obvious by now they don't care what you think of them, as long as you continue to "need" their software and no markets are closed off to them. They fight tooth and nail when a market is open to more competition for them or if they have to limit the bundling of their software. But patent and monopoly abuse cases are just settled, saving them money.
Developers: We can use your help.
IBM is no longer the monopolist it once was, in large part because of the punishment they suffered for abusing their position. I don't think you could say the same of Microsoft. And I'm sure that Bill can accumulate the amount of the fine by simply going through the couches at his mansion.
We could take a page from their marketing department though. Linus should announce a huge list of features for the 2.7/2.8 kernel series. If they don't all make it in, he can just announce that they've just been "delayed" until the "Linux Longhorn" release in 2020. Heh heh heh...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Well, actually, both wrong (parent & grand parent).
The dominance will stay for a while, but MS won't have large revenues either. Most people won't switch to *nix from windows just like that, BUT most people won't buy a new version of windows neither. That's why you see those weird statistics about win98 being still there in the top. Although, when these systems DO get really outdated (with hardware changes), most users WILL consider switching to linux if they know about it rather than buying windows.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
These three are just security holes.
They are just three SYMPTOMS of one security hole and that security hole is called ActiveX. If Microsoft was REAL serious about security in Longhorn, ActiveX would be rewritten with security in mind. Anything that is "ActiveX aware" can reformat your hard drive and more. These things include MS Office, IE, Outlook Express, Outlook, WMP, and the list goes on. COM/OLE objects are great but having a web site be able to run/install a com object onto a machine from IE is INSANE!!!! Somebody at Microsoft should have asked "what is to stop someone from abusing this technology?" and then decided not to implement it because they did not have a good answer to that question. If it was not for the lack of security in ActiveX technologies, MS security would not be so abismally shoddy.
I miss the Karma Whores.
Most of the mini-apps aren't applicable in the enterprise. If you need a cluster DB setup, why do you need the Windows Media API let alone the client bits installed on the machine? It simply isn't applicable and worse it is unremovable.
But that is an extreme case. In a more practical setup, why does Microsoft get the say on installing any software like WMP on my grandmother's machine? As you noted, because the way Microsoft has developed the technology installing one piece of technology to solve a problem often means you install many more pieces of software none of which solve the problem (let alone you maybe interested in). Why? Because they want to sell server technology solutions to some other unrelated vendor? Something is fishy about that.
I guess the grand question is how fair or legal is this? I don't know if the EU is doing the right or wrong things for the right reasons but I can tell you it sure stinks from an IT perspective. Being forced to solved problems on software you didn't want installed in the first place but because of some dependance you have to stinks.
Actually MS seems to make pissing off judges part of their strategy. If they can get the judge to do something foolish, they get an appealable issue. This has worked in the past for them. I'm not really sure how well it works in Europe, probably U.S. is not too popular and MS even less so.