Windows 7 Eyed For Antitrust Violations

Preedit writes "The committee that oversees Microsoft's compliance with the 2002 antitrust settlement now has its hands on Windows 7. The Technical Committee is checking to see if the software meets the settlement's terms. Among other things, it's looking at whether Windows 7 favors Microsoft apps over third party programs, according to InformationWeek. The story also notes that Vista SP1 includes a number of changes that were added to satisfy the committee. For instance, it eliminates several browser overrides where Vista ignored users' default preferences and automatically launched Explorer. Windows 7 is due sometime around 2010."

Comments

Who cares

[Brian Gordon]

We're just going to hack it anyway to run whatever 3rd party apps we want.. the EU is really going overboard IMO with forcing microsoft to make their OS how the EU wants it made. If microsoft wants to make Internet Explorer the only app that can access the internet, that's their prerogative.. nobody has to buy Windows. Even if there was no excellent free alternative, which there is.

Re:Who cares

[downix]

Actually, that is the whole crux of the EU arguement, Microsoft DID force people to buy Windows... in particular PC manufacturers. If you wanted ANY machines with Windows, ALL of your machines had to be Windows. You wanted any Office software, it had to be MS Office or else no Windows which means no PC's.

Amazing how people blatantly ignore this.

Re:Who cares

[Citizen of Earth]

If microsoft wants to make Internet Explorer the only app that can access the internet, that's their prerogative..

False. Governments have the right and the duty to protect the relatively free market from abusive monopolies.

Re:Who cares

[AKAImBatman]

I wondered why it's so wrong if the Microsoft OS works better with its own software?

If Microsoft had solid competition, there would be no problem. The issue as it stands is that Microsoft has a monopoly on the Operating System business. Because of that monopoly, Microsoft can crush nearly any competitor they want in other areas by ensuring that their own software works better than the competitor's software. Examples of this include:

- Windows Media Player provides a superior Windows experience than RealPlayer

- IE provided a superior browsing experience on Windows over Netscape Navigator

In both cases, Microsoft effectively wiped out those company's markets by giving the software away for free. Which meant that Real and Netscape could no longer charge for their software.

Now one can argue that Microsoft produced superior products to both company's offerings. And there would be truth to that statement. The problem is that Microsoft ensured that there will never again be competitors in either space. Microsoft effectively wiped both markets out of existence and forced consumers to accept higher costs for Windows to subsidize those markets. Even worse, there is then zero incentive for Microsoft to innovate in either market. So consumers pay higher prices when no new development is happening in those areas.

While some balance is returning to those markets thanks to Apple and Open Source, the damage done has been extremely negative for the industry, with the WMV pseudo-standard and the IE pseudo-standard locking out competing OSes for nearly a decade. From an economist's point of view, the OS, multimedia, and web-browser markets would be a lot farther along today if Microsoft had never managed a stranglehold on these markets.

Re:Who cares

[Speare]

Governments have the right and the duty to protect the relatively free market from abusive monopolies. Governments don't have rights. They have powers.

Re:Who cares

[scuba0]

Mircosoft does a lot of bad things, but giving away software is not one of them.
Oh, so you think that all software that Microsoft is not charging you for is free?, it is not! Every customer that buys Windows is paying for all applications that follow with. By locking their customers in with their built-in software which is mostly in the way they are missuisng their monopoly.

Re:Who cares

[vux984]

Mircosoft does a lot of bad things, but giving away software is not one of them. Their competitors (various open source projects) give away much higher quality code for free. Every time Microsoft tries to add a new feature, they get their asses sued off by every company that hacked in that new feature before, and are now charging ridiculous amounts of money for it.

The first part is that it isn't that Microsoft gives it away for free that is the problem, its that they bundle it, make it the default, and even integrate it with the OS.

If Microsoft limited their free giveaways to software that had to be downloaded from their website and installed manually, their competitors would have a lot less to bitch about.

And the second part is that the rules CHANGE when you have a monopoly. What are perfectly acceptable business practices in a competitive market are abusive and illegal in a monopoly. In a competitive market if you don't like what a company is doing you just stop buying from them... in a monopoly you can't, so market forces cease to be effective.

Re:Who cares

[vux984]

And how is that different than Mac OS and all their bundled software?

Seriously? I only wrote 3 short paragraphs. You couldn't make it all the way through? Heres part of paragraph number 3:

"... the rules CHANGE when you have a monopoly. What are perfectly acceptable business practices in a competitive market are abusive and illegal in a monopoly...."

The difference between Mac OS and Windows is that Windows has been found to be a monopoly; and Microsoft has been convicted of abusing that monopoly. Mac OS isn't, and Apple hasn't.

See the difference?

Hint: Its not about -what- they do. Its about how what they do affects the market. Apple, by not having a monopoly, has more freedom to use different business practices because its unable to utterly distort and abuse the market. Microsoft, by contrast, has less freedom to use those same business practices because when they do use them it does utterly distort and abuse the market.