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French Judge Orders Refund For Pre-Installed XP
Racketiciel writes "A French user asked for a refund after buying an ASUS computer
that came with Windows XP and other software pre-installed. ASUS tried to
apply a procedure which cost more money to the consumer than they
will give back... The court ruled in favor of the user,
who received back 130 Euro (~200 $) for the software.
Here is the ruling (PDF, French). In France, this is the fourth victory for refund seekers during the last two years,
and many people are now filing for refunds (in French). Two French associations (AFUL
and April) published
a press release on this victory the same day an important hearing happened." The English-language press release linked above gives a pretty good idea of what happened here, for those unsuited to wading through French.
I don't know that I have anything solid to base this on, but I've always guessed that the real cost per copy that larger systems makers have to pass on to Microsoft is more in the $30 range.
Collector's Edition
This will force the PC vendors (in France anyway) to provide better Linux options.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Unlike USA - where the DOJ's anti-trust ruling has no real impact on MS's business - the Eurpoeans take this more seriously. They feel that there should be options other than the monopolistic one.
Forcing vendors to give back more than the XP cost sends a clear message: give non-MS options or feel the pain.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What surprises me is that the French got labelled as surrender-happy, when Norway, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg all did the same thing, not to mention the Italians which switched sides in both world wars to avoid being the losing side.
:P ).
Btw France fought tooth and nail in the first world war, so its not from that (and it certainly wasn't taken over, you might want to brush up on history a bit
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Jokes are just that.
In Texas, we make all kinds of jokes about "Aggies" implying they are exceptionally stupid.
And then there are blond and dead baby jokes.
Your average french citizen is similar to people from other cultures.
I'm sure the french soldiers on the Magenot [sp] line would have fought very hard to defend france but they got driven around. The folks behind the line were not ready to fight germans with tanks with virtually no warning. To have something like the impact of a blitzkrieg war today, imagine that an enemy country could teleport their entire army inside your country.
However, just like an "aggie" joke or a "blonde" joke or a "dead baby" joke wouldn't make any sense with some other subject, the "french surrender" jokes wouldn't be funny with someone else now. I laughed at the "French military rifles for sale, dropped once" joke myself.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
A heck of a lot of us live in countries where the native language isn't English. I'm English from the UK, but living 20 years over here in Greece (Europe).
Most of the laptop vendors ship *only* the local native language version of (mostly) Windows Vista. If you're really lucky then you might see the English version. I spend a lot of time "cleaning" bloody Greek Vista *off* new Acers, HP notebooks and replacing it with English XP. You see - here in Athens (Greece if you forgot) we have lots and lots of people from all over the world (who don't want a Greek system but got stuck with it when they bought their nice new shiny whatever).
I have the pleasure of babysitting a friends internet cafe (on sundays it's more like Manilla than Athens because that's the day the girls from the Phillipines get their day off - eat yer heart out basement dwellers (grins)).
Some of this nonsense wouldn't be needed if Vista shipped MUI out of the tin . (Curiously though the MUI version of XP seems to be the norm amongst my friends from the arab world).
If a machine ships with what is essentially a "useless" system, then you should be able to refuse the EULA and get a refund. What i'd really like to see is some EU wide ruling as to the *size* of that refund so that consumers would be aware of their rights . Fitness for use etc. is an issue.
Andy.
Needed to be said. As a Briton I've more fondness for France than America (an unusually position as most people here loathe them both with equal measure) and am getting tired of these French=Cowards jokes. In many ways their country is better than ours, and this should be a source of embarrassment for us because they have a similar sized economy and population. I guess that is why it is deemed necessary for the media to lay on the French-hate so thick, in case British people start to say "Hey, why can't we have fast trains that turn up on time?" and such stuff.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Even though the French are our traditional enemy here in England, when I was a kid (I'm in my 50s too) the meme was the Italians surrendering. Presumably because they did try to surrender in WWII (admittedly in the direction we liked), which it seems counted more than the simple tactical withdrawal France made over Paris. It seems an interesting reflection on the notion of honour.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Completely irrelevant. French law, as in most of Europe, does not allow tying (bundling two or more products and refusing to sell them independently). If someone wants to buy a product by itself and the reseller refuses, then the approach of buying the product and requesting a refund for part of the bundle and suing if they refuse is perfectly reasonable - it's a way of ensuring that there's a real reason to comply with the law, lest they have to deal with a spate of lawsuits.
These laws have been on the book for decades, and they've proven time and time again to be good for consumers and good for competition.
Don't like it? Then don't do business here. Just as you have to comply with a buttload of other laws to do business anywhere, we expect people to adhere to laws to protect consumers and competition.
For someone that is the extremely naive libertarian in the sense of "the least number of laws possible" I can see opposing this, but anyone that want a market that is as free as possible really should think twice before coming out against laws like this - history is full of tying arrangements that have created real market barriers. Microsoft's practice of blanket licenses for OEM's being a perfect example. But Microsoft only got slapped down over it because of their extreme dominance - a smaller but still large player could still do a lot of damage with similar tactics.
It's a leftover of initial reactions in the media of Britain and the US to the shocking defeat of France in just a few weeks in 1940.
A similar thing happened in the first few days American stwith the Netherlands. While the Dutch army was being ripped apart by the Germans, newspapers in the rest of the world were wildly speculating about fifth columns and the neutral Dutch's unwillingness to really put up a fight (in other words treason).
Even though everyone already knew that the Dutch would be no match for the Germans, public opinion was simply not prepared for a war in which a country could be overrun in a matter of days. Even a lackluster performance should have been able to hold off the enemy for "just a month" in people's minds (with WWI as a frame of reference) to give the French time to deploy.
After the Germans finished off the Dutch, just a few days later the French-Belgian-British defence also started collapsing, and the newspapers shifted their attention to perceived French cowardice and incompetent leadership (treason being a lesser explanation here, since the French weren't neutral).
Since the Germans didn't KO any more formidable powers than France after that, this analysis of events got stuck in people's minds.
The events of 1940 of course clearly show the superiority of Germany over their neighbours, but comparing US performance in later years to the losers of 1940 is really apples and oranges: in the spring of 1940 the US standing army was no larger and hardly better prepared than the mobilized Dutch or Belgian one, and in 1940 all of Europe had just started producing newly designed aircraft and tanks that would have given them the edge over the Germans given a year. It is just distance and a large body of water that makes the difference.