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MS, EU Agree on Name for Windows Sans Media Player
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has agreed with European Union antitrust regulators on a new name for Windows software sold in Europe. Officials at the U.S. software giant said they had accepted the European Union's offer to call the European version of Windows sold without Media Player "Windows XP Home Edition N" - with "N" standing for "not with media player." Microsoft's "XP Professional Edition" will also include the "N" for versions sold without the media player. The prior name for the OS was Windows XP Reduced Media Edition." News.com also mentions the choice.
And who is going to stock this stripped down version?
MS can print 10 copies of it and send one to each shop, they hide it on the back of the shelvs and they are sticking to the law.
Plus "professional/home edition" or "N" hmm which sounds better..
I like muppets.
There are allready some comments and there will be many more in the line of "and Joe Sixpack will not buy it".
This might of course be true, but that's not what this case is about. This is about PC vendors being able to sell a fullblown XP PC without windows media player, but with an other media installed that takes it place.
For example, some PC vendor could strike a deal with Apple to sell a PC and an ipod bundle and have itunes and quicktime included in XP and not the windows media player.
He [MS Rep] added that the company had "some misgivings" about the new name, but decided in the end to cooperate.
Seems the EU Commision dictated what this product will be named. While I understand MS lost and must face sanctions, I fail to see why they would care what MS calls the product or how their laws could allow for such intrusion in basic marketing practices not at all related to the case at hand. Perhaps the EU can now get busy dictating the packaging it will be shipped in and start writing the ad campaigns.
Remember the arguments that MS made during IE litigation? They said that removal of IE would cripple the OS . . . I wonder if they will eventually be putting hooks into the bundled WMP that aren't available in the separate d/l version? And then they will use the excuse that these features are "impossible" to include in the OS without bundling them in from the beginning (a completely bogus argument, but one that they made in the past with IE).
Of course I expect them to play ball with the EU commission for the time being, but I fully expect a future version that will leave EU customers behind because WMP isn't bundled. And EU customers will be pissed. Then MS will say to the EU Commission, "Don't you see how your customers demand that we bundle WMP with the OS? They are demanding the product that you have taken away from them!"
And if MS's plan goes to fruition, the EU commission will have egg on its face . . .
That has nothing to do with the article. Furthermore, software patents would not allow only MS, but any company (and technically individual) to gain "thousands of monopolies".
The software patent issue is far, far larger and more important than some "M$ versus teh world!" issue; please don't denigrate it to such.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Let the WMP lie down in the dustiest corner of the file system. Let the OEM install Winamp, QuickTime and XMMS to boot.
Just make the phrase "you cannot install competing stuff" illegal to appear in a license. Because locking out others is anticompetitive and not bundling.
The message should be: "Do your business. Compete on merit. Let the user/OEM/whoever choose." not "remove the media player (r) (tm) and continue your dirty games".
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
Many people have thought it, but I want to ask the question: why didn't they go for the thing that was thought to be in violation of antitrust laws (at least in the US)? I understand the points that DRM with WMP could present a corner market, but the thing is, I don't really mind WMP. I personally use mplayer on Linux, but it takes some work to get all the Quicktime plugins installed, all the WMP codecs installed, and then the AC3/MPG4, etc., codecs installed, etc. There is something to be said about a media player that understands most codecs (obviously not Quicktime), and isn't difficult to use.
Now consider IE; go grab Firefox or Mozilla or Opera. You now have argueably a better browser, with the same amount of functionality. You only lose where people use MS-specific Javascript extensions, along with a small handful of other nuances. So they remove the program that really doesn't make a difference, in my mind, and leave the one that MS really got in trouble for. Good job EU!
The argument about cars doesn't really apply, car manufacturers don't have any control of the roads or fuel etc, one car maker can't make the roads or the commonly available fuel incompatible with competing cars, and they cant make it difficult for existing users of their cars to send their car to the scrapheap and buy a competitor vehicle. This is exactly what microsoft do.
But your right about the EU going about this the wrong way, file formats, API's and network protocols need to be opened up fully so that competitors can write their own apps that are fully compatible.
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Do you even know what happened there? Nah, it's more fun to jump at a wrong conclusion, eh?
The fact is more simple than that. The EU didn't as much "haggle", it just rejected Microsoft's idea of calling it "Reduced Edition". Th-th-that's all, folks.
So:
1. It didn't even involve much manpower.
2. If MS didn't want to haggle or tie up "government manpower", it could have simply not picked a name that showed outright contempt to the court's decision.
MS wasn't even ordered to change all Windows XP copies it sells, it just was ordered to _also_ sell a version without the media player alongside with the normal version. In a way that doesn't discourage people from buying that version. (E.g., no charging twice for the non-MP version.)
I'd say that MS got off pretty easily there.
It seems to me that slapping a name on it that basically says "don't buy this one" is if anything just a way to show contempt there. So it just got told "nope, that won't do. Pick another one."
That's all the "haggling out."
It's that simple.
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