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Microsoft Faces Fresh Antitrust Complaints
Rob wrote to mention a Computer Business Online review piece about new anti-trust action against Microsoft on both sides of the Atlantic. From the article: "Other examples of anticompetitive behavior cited by Tangent include bundling of Outlook with Office and Active Directory with Windows Server, as well as the bundling of Windows Media Player and Windows Media Server with its desktop and server operating system respectively. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment on Tangent's complaint, other than to acknowledge that it was being reviewed, but was more forthcoming in responding to a fresh complaint lodged with the European Commission by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS)."
Don't you have to buy Office and, thus, buy an office suite? One that would, presumably, include email and calendar functionality?
Can't you purchase Office modules separately? I was sure I had seen boxes of Word, Excel, etc. a few years back.
Remember we started the present suit against M$ in 2001...5 years later we see no change!
Microsoft Windows Media Player (TM) is an essential piece of the Microsoft Winddows operating system (TM). Without it, the operating system could not function. It was not placed to put any competition out of business or to get a "monopoly". All of those accusations are undeniably false.
Sincerely,
Steve Ballmer.
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Bundling software isn't anti-competitive behaviour unless there's something else going on, like forcing computer manufacturers to bundle that software with their computers.
Nobody is forced to use Active Directory when they set up a Windows server, although most people do because it makes sense. Honestly, as someone who's not worked with large linux networks, I'm not sure what the alternative would be. However, lack of a viable alternative, or even lack of a popular alternative, doesn't make Microsoft wrong for packaging Active Directory with their product.
Bundling Outlook with Office may be slightly closer to anti-competitive behavior, but I still think it's a BS complaint. I know plenty of people that choose to use Netscape Navigator, Eudora, or Thunderbird for email, even though they own the Office suite. Wouldn't complaining about Outlook Express make a little more sense, since it's packaged with the OS?
This reminds me of people playing the race card... it's done even when that complaint isn't accurate, and as a result makes people less likely to believe when there's a REAL issue.
What's next... claiming that inclusion of MS Paint is anti-competitive?
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
The Internet Explorer licence states that you must have a licence to Windows in order to run it. Meaning, you can download IE and install it on Linux, but according to the licence, it's not legal.
NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALID EULA FOR ANY "OS PRODUCT" (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, MICROSOFT WINDOWS 98, MICROSOFT WINDOWS NT 4.0, MICROSOFT WINDOWS 2000, MICROSOFT MILLENNIUM EDITION, MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP, OR ANY OTHER MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM THAT IS A SUCCESSOR TO ANY OF THE FOREGOING OPERATING SYSTEMS) YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INSTALL, COPY, OR OTHERWISE USE THE OS COMPONENTS AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA.
Unfortunately, I don't have a link to this, I just copy and pasted from the IE6 Installer. I imagine Windows Media Player has something similar.
The only valid point that I thought the article made had to do with Word documents. It's no secret that interpretting Word documents is haphazard at best (just look at OpenOffice) and that standards need to be documented more thoroughly. Almost everything else in that article seemed like nit picking, and for once I feel bad for Microsoft.
They can't win: if they include Windows Media Player with their OS they get sued, if they don't include it they get hundreds of thousands of complaints from users and even more Microsoft bashing than before. If they include Active Directory with their OS they get sued, if the don't include it they get thousands of complaints from administrators and even more Microsoft bashing than before. The list goes on and on. As for Outlook being bundled with Office, I think that since Office is a suite consumers pay for (either in retail channels or through OEMs), Microsoft should be able to include what it wants to. Outlook is part of the suite, plain and simple.
Next week's top story: "TextPad Sues Microsoft for Bundling Notepad with its Windows Operating System"
-William Brendel
The latest news is that, according to Yahoo! News and BBC News, a fresh anti-trust complaint has been filed with the EC against Microsoft by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (composed of IBM, Oracle, RealNetworks, Sun & Nokia). Although the complaint was filed privately, ECIS hinted (see the links) that it related to MS Office.
The story here is about Tangent, a computer manufacturer who filed a federal suit against MS in a Northern Californian court on Valentine's Day. I've found two articles which go into more detail on this: Gameshout and ZDNet.
Basically, the complaints in this suit relate to:
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
GM has been accused of bundling engines with transmissions, Pioneer has been accused of bundling speakers with stereo equipment and, Bob's big boy has been accused of bundling plates with silverware.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Well the problem with the existence of windows media player is somehow an oddity. Windows OS needs some kind of media player for preview purposes. I know, It's just something flashy, but what do you see when you enter a folder, highlight a movie and a small preview with stop and play appears. It's flasy and of course sometimes usefull. Of course there might be programming interdependencies with IE and Windows Explorer that we don't know yet. From here to a full fledged player is just a simple step. You only have to put on the player engine a nice interface and 'voila you have a player, BUT, it's not bundled, it's integrated, it is part of the OS itself. The same thing is with the Internet Explorer. Hell, Windows Explorer is in fact containing IE in itself, or viceversa. Microsoft Windows is not an OS its a package. I agree with EU only at some points. MS has to make the code available such that integration with 3rd party software is much easier, but you should not force out parts of the system. Going on like that we will return to DOS shell's. Why ? because there is Total Commander as file manager, there are other windows game's providers, there is Winamp and Co, we have alternatives to anything, so what remains from the package, a simple core. MS does not sell that. On the other part if the customer is getting an OS that has media capabilities incorporated, why should he buy InterVideo software for playing DVD's, or why should he bother downloading the free BSPlayer. Common users will not do this step and thus 3rd party software providers are having a hard time fighting MS. Still if another media software provider wants to sell more of its products then he should make it better, more performant and flashier. Mozilla has done it, even forcing removal of the IE.
WHY does everybody keep talking about Microsoft monopolies, then talking about Explorer, Outlook, and... everything but the OS?
Nobody is forced to use Explorer (even if it is a part of the OS). Nobody is forced to use Outlook, Active Directory, or WMP.
What we ARE forced to put up with as software engineers (if we want to actually sell any units) is their OS! Mac users and some expert PC gurus running Linux aside, Microsoft has a monopoly on the OS market. If we in the US are so anti-monopoly (and there's a lot of precedent -- Standard Oil, Ma Bell etc), why haven't we broken up this one by making the OS open-source and allowing MS to continue as it pleases with its other products (which don't force anyone to use them.)
I can't be the only one to see this -- but I just don't get why people keep talking about the big, bad Microsoft monopoly -- then looking right PAST the one thing they *do* have a monopoly on. It's all very confusing to me.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
(IANAL yadda yadda) The difference is that Microsoft is a convicted monopoly. The things they are, and aren't allowed to do, CHANGE because of their status as a monopoly. The day that Apple controls 90% (at least) market share, and then bundles the same software with their OS that they do now, is the day the'll be screamed at. When you're a monopoly you cannot bundle competitive products(ie a Browser or Media Player). More specifically you can't punish or threaten your distributors for adding or removing components from that bundle. Given that I don't think they have much of a case with Outlook, maybe with Active Directory, but even that is a bit of a stretch.
If there is anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot now.
Maybe, but it still doesn't force you to install Outlook. I seem to recall that the installer allowed you to install, provisionally install, or not install each component separately. So you could by the cheaper version which included the programs you don't want and just unselect those components during the install.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Linux comes bundled with a media player?
Where can I get in on this anti trust action, I see a fresh victim.
Xaotik Designs
Ubuntu Linux comes with these applications; uninstalling them removes the 'ubuntu-desktop' meta-package. Subsiquently, upgrading to the next release of Ubuntu without having 'ubuntu-desktop' installed breaks Ubuntu.
I just spent quite a few attacks at them chiding them for poor behavior packaging the ubuntu-desktop seed with python bindings and development tools not used by any visible user applications. This was out of scope for what they describe on their site; and removing it would remove the desktop seed, breaking upgrades of the OS.
At no point , however, did I threaten to sue them for what they were doing, or even imply that they didn't have a right to do it; my only arguments were that it was immature and out of scope for their project, and that they seemed to be trying to keep people from finding out about all the extra bloat—mainly by only mentioning it on one very obscure, short, and burried FAQ entry instead of blatantly stating, "And Ubuntu comes with a full set of Python development tools out of the box," on the main page.
It has been said that the reason Python tools are included with Ubuntu but not C or C++ tools is that "Ubuntu wants to encourage Python development" and "when the user goes to pick a language to use, Python will already be there and ready, so they'll use that." Nobody has tried to sue Canonical. You still have the choice NOT TO USE IT, even if not NOT TO HAVE IT.
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The EU's problem with the bundling of WMP is that Microsoft effectively killed competition in the market before the video player market had a chance to develop. Their accusation is that Microsoft was so effective at this because they are a monopoly. If they weren't a monopoly, they would have merely tied the success of the Windows product to the success of WMP and visa versa.
The result of Microsoft's abuse of power was that the leaders in the market (RealPlayer and Quicktime) effectively lost their places overnight, and the upstarts who were just starting to compete disappeared at the same time. (Remember when Quicktime was the defacto video player for multimedia programs, and RealPlayer was the defacto choice for streaming content?) From that perspective, the EU is correct. Microsoft wiped out an industry for one more Windows feature, and forced their player down everyone's throats. Note that improvements to the market stopped right there. There have been no significant changes to video players since Microsoft arrived on the market. The only company doing innovation in that area is Apple with their Quicktime product and their support of the Sorenson codecs.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
There are a couple differnces between Apple and MS bundling software. The biggest being that Apple is an OEM who is bundling software with a computer, thus needs to provide a "complete" experience. MS is theoretically providing software that OEM's may or may not bundle with a computer. So when MS "bundles" things, it gives OEMs less choice in what software they bundle for their customers. IE/Netscape is the classic example of how this works out.
No, quicktime didn't ever "suck", it was always quite good. But the argument you make about it being part of the O.S. can be applied to anything...
It started with things that really are a function of the O.S. (loading and running programs) and then started including things like editing text files and memory managers (which actually make sense for an OS) and evolved into including browsers and email clients (ie and outlook express). So now you want to include media player... and what else? Pretty soon Windows will cost $500 but come bundled with MS Office Suite, and people will be like "but isn't that the job of the O.S.? I mean, why would I buy a computer and not want a word processor and spreadsheet?"
The answer is you might want a word processor and spreadsheet. But then again, you might not. Who is to say everyone wants a media player? Why do people pay hundreds of dollars for an O.S. and then believe they got something for free?
To be fair, I wouldn't pay a damn nickel for anybody's media player. It started with Quicktime - a free download. RealPlayer... a free download. The problem is, like the browser, that MS gets THEIR software installed on virtually every windows machine, and so instead of formats competing on their merits, content authors use the MS formats. So MS doesn't just get it's software on your computer, they get to control the formats. Since you need their players to play the formats, they start doing things like monitoring what you watch, adding DRM, and other things that couldn't happen if someone didn't have a monopoly.
Yes, you are free to download other software (and I do!), but most people don't know enough about it.
Not that that is MS's problem; it's not their fault most users are stupid. So I'm not arguing for or against, but a media player is NOT an integral part of an operating system. I rarely use it. I probably use QT more often (trailers and such). I use Firefox. I use Thunderbird. I've NEVER EVER gotten a virus.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Actually, the WMV format is far superior to QT when it comes to properly compressing them to a low bitrate. I go out of my way to avoid installing QT (which is very difficult to get without iTunes bundled, isn't that more 'unfair bundling'?) because I don't like it as a player or as a format. Not to say it's bad, it's just not the best.
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