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PC Makers See Little Reason to Deploy XP N
suitepotato writes "In this article, Ingrid Marson reports to CNet News that in a small survey of companies such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo, there are no real plans to deploy Microsoft's Windows XP N which was the version required by the European Union. It would seem that despite the rants of anger towards Microsoft that they were unfairly bundling Windows Media Player with Windows XP, the public at large would not seem to agree and is not actually demanding any such stripped down version. Perhaps the EU's actions were unnecessary?"
The people who really were hurt were the competitors. If they were hurt to the point of being driven out of business, -then- the public would be hurt. The whole point of protection from monopoly abuse is to catch these situations -before- the public suffers irreparable harm....
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Perhaps the EU's actions were unnecessary?
Or perhaps the actions were useless because they were poorly designed and did not address the real problem? OK bundling is bad because it allows a monopoly to extend their monopoly. Forcing MS to offer a version without the bundled application is useless because everyone who buys Windows still has to pay for it.
Here comes the inevitable analogy...
The electric company has a monopoly on electricity distribution in any given area. If you want electricity you have to buy from them or go to great lengths to create your own. Imagine if the electric company raised everyone's rates by $10 a month. Now imagine they took that $10 and bought ice cream which they gave away for free to all their customers. Not all of their customers wanted the ice cream and but some liked it. Now the ice cream manufacturers all lost all their business, complained, and sued. The government, in its infinite wisdom decreed that the electric company had to offer electricity without free ice cream, they did not, however, say it had to be cheaper than the other package. The result is nothing. The solution does not stop the bad behavior.
The media player part of the settlement was completely useless. The only parts that were not useless were the parts requiring sharing interoperability information and even those are severely watered down. Obviously if your choice is $60 for electricity or $60 for electricity and ice cream most people will choose the latter. What needs to happen is MS needs to be required to offer the media player only as a separate application. OEMs can add it or Realplayer or both or neither but MS can't give incentives or breaks to OEMs that include windows media player. That would fix the problem. That will likely never happen because MS has too much money and politicians are too corrupt.
I just noticed that you got modded into oblivion. I don't necessarily agree with you, but a lot of people are thinking it, so I wish your post was still above zero... :-(
How do you break up Microsoft? You can't break it up into regional offices like what was done to the phone company, because that doesn't make sense. But how do you break up Microsoft in a way that's not utterly arbitrary?
I mean, everyone around here see Microsoft as selling an OS and bundling a bunch of extra apps with it like a media player and a web browser. The distinction being that they are providing both a platform as well as apps that run on that platform, and a breakup would be between the OS developers and the application developers. But that's not the only way to look at it, and not even necessarily the best way.
If you look at Microsoft, they have purchased webTV and created the XBox, and have split off their OS into a consumer and a professional edition. It's pretty obvious that they are heavily pushing their wares as an "appliance", where people just want it to work. In that context, it's not unreasonable that they sell a complete working system with a web browser and a media player. The OS is secondary to the goal of providing functionality to the user. It's dumb to break off the media player and the browser, because that's what they are trying to sell to the public, a solution and not an OS.
So, you could break off their app divisions that aren't related to their media appliance goals, so you'd have MSWindows+IE+mplayer, and maybe another company that does MS Office and the visio+sharepoint infopath stuff. That would make sense, but it wouldn't address the problems that competitors have with Windows as it is now.
What I want to know is, when people say break up microsoft, what do they mean, and defend their position as to why they think it's a good idea.
I believe that the playing field should be kept level, and that other companies should be treated just as Microsoft was by the EU.
I agree as soon as Apple is declared by the courts to have a monopoly on desktop operating systems I think they should be forced to comply with all the anti-trust regulations that would then apply to them. Oh wait, the same laws do apply it's just that Apple is not a monopoly and MS is.
Yes you can uninstall all of those applications from OS X very easily with the exception of Dashboard which is actually a part of the OS and is built into the UI. It can be removed with a little know how though. All of that, however, is immaterial.
The problem is not with companies bundling things together in general. If someone wants to sell fish and cheese together, great, good luck. The problem is that if one company has a monopoly on something and only sells that that something bundled with something else it drives everyone else out of business. That is why their are special rules for monopolies, because they can upset free trade by coercing their customers. MS has and is doing just that. They can sell all the cheese they want and all the fish they want, but they can't sell only fish and cheese bundles once they have established a monopoly on fish.
Of course no one wants the stripped down version because it costs the same as the full-blown version .
This isn't vindication for MS - it is just proof of the stupidity of the EU bureaucrats who did a half-assed job of imposing the punishment on MS. If they weren't so incompetent, they would have mandated that not only must MS make a stripped down version, they also gotta sell it for proportionally less too where "lots" is equal to some value of proportional...
reference: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22283