Ummm, how about doing exactly what they did, but anonymously, so that we know they didn't just do it for the positive press?
Reputation is one of the main reasons proponents of open source use to justify giving your code away. And yet, when MS does exactly that, you complain. If you're consistent, we should also hear you rant about the fact that Linus Torvalds signed his code and didn't release the Linux kernel anonymously. Well?
I think you're both to some extent missing the point about the true disconnect between percentage of income and the amount of sacrifice you are making when giving to charity.
The OP said "If you put a quarter in the cup [...] you're donating a larger fraction of your income to charity than Bill Gates". The assertion seemed to me to be orders of magnitude out of whack, so I decided to do a quick and dirty verification. That was the entire point of my post.
It's not difficult to do a back of the envelope calculation before posting. It's not difficult to do at least a perfunctory check of your facts (Google is your friend!) before posting. I know that's Slashdot, but still, this gleeful indifference to facts annoys me a lot (must be my engineer brain).
Of course, if you're living at poverty level, donating even a small percentage of your income is painful. My example was however really contrived: I tried to give the OP the benefit of all possible doubt, and forced all assumptions in his favor.
If however we consider a more reasonable example, say somebody who makes $50000 an year and eats once a month at McDonalds, we end up with a donation of 3 bucks/year, a percentage of 0.006 % of the income. I don't really see it as a sacrifice - certainly not one that allows the OP to pretend to any moral superiority over Gates who donated "only" 27 billions.
If you put a quarter in the cup at mcdonalds each time you get a big Mac, chances are you're donating a larger fraction of your income to charity than Bill Gates does. Sure, it's better to donate something than nothing, but as the old saying goes, it's not what you give, it's what you sacrifice. The point of the comment was that Bill Gates can't make up for all the wrong he's done by giving away what is, to him, a pittance.
Not that I don't like a good rant, but let's run some numbers. Assuming you eat 3 times a day at McDonalds, you end up giving 75 c a day, or less than $275 a year. Assuming you reached 49 years (as old as Bill Gates) despite your terrible dietary habits, and you started working at 20, you ended up donating less than $8000. Even if you're at poverty level, that is you make $9827/year, your total income over this period would be close to 285000 dollars; so you're giving about 2% of your total income. Bill Gates donated close to $27 billion, and has a net worth of about 47 billion, so that's about 36% of his net worth. Looks like Gates got you beat here too.
Until your windows install craps out and starts stalling for over a minute at the welcome screen.
You probably have some service that fails and timeouts at startup. Check your event logs to identify the failing service, and fix it. This behavior may for example happen if you removed some hardware but for didn't properly uninstall all software. There may be other causes too, but the event log should tell you what's going on.
They were also professions largely consisting of two classes of people: the idle rich and the dedicated artist who was willing to live in poverty. Copyright law has made it possible for normal people to at least make some money off of their creative works
Or an artist could find a rich patron; somebody willing to pay for the artist's subsistence in exchange for art. The result is, of course, control over the artist's output. So we see (as in many classical musical and literary works) ridiculously exaggerated flattery of the artist's Maecenas, and uncritical support of the particular political or economical position of the above mentioned patron.
I don't believe it would be good for the society to return to this kind of situation: consider that the ones that can afford supporting artists are exactly the ones that shouldn't be in control of even more propaganda tools.
I always thought it was amusing that Apple names their OS releases after fast, nimble predators. While MS names theirs after the prey.
So what does that mean?
It means you don't know what you're talking about. The only Microsoft code name that could be a big cat prey was Impala (NT 4 embedded). You may say so's Longhorn, but the origin of the code name is in reality the name of a saloon positioned between the Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, in Whistler BC. Look here for a more complete list of internal code names.
Guess what? Many of the people who managed to write operating systems in assembler in a few K in the 80s were also "unqualified amateurs".
Yes, that's what many of them were. Don't let yourself be unnecessarily impressed: an OS that fits in a few kb is really not such a big deal - and FWIW, I was one of those guys, having built my own Z80 computer and written the software for it (including keyboard, video, casette and floppy drivers, a nice monitor with a few debug capabilities and a small assembler). Being a professional programmer requires more than enthusiasm.
But the problem for Microsoft is that it's basically a house of cards. Every other facet of Microsoft loses money other than Office and Windows.
I'm sorry, but you're uninformed. It's really easy to research the facts a bit, rather than just parroting slashbot folklore. Find the numbers as presented by Microsoft here. Or, if you want a simplified presentation look here for a nice graph with Microsoft's revenue per division. Note that four out of seven divisions are profitable (and, for the last quarter, the XBox group was profitable too, but that's probably a glitch produced by Halo 2). Also, note that the Server and Tools division had revenue of $2,235 million for the 3 month ending September 04, comparable with either Client (that's mostly Windows) at $2,993 million and Information Worker (that's Office) at $2,560 million
If either of those fail, the entire company would fail with it.
Wrong again; the most successful division, Client, has an operating income of $2,392 million. Microsoft's total operating income is over $4 billion. If the Client division were to bring no income whatsoever, Microsoft's total operating income would still be almost 2 billion for the quarter.
That's why it is so desperate to do something different, e.g., Xbox, WebTV, WinCE, search, Windows Media Video 9/HD-DVD, etc. Thus, if Microsoft was forced to lower prices on Office/Windows, they'd have to start dumping all of their money losing areas to stay afloat.
Bad analysis, based on ignorance and hear-say. You're only looking to consumer-side stuff and ignoring all corporation-level work. Note that Microsoft is pushing a lot in the corporate space, with the Server and Tools and Business Solutions divisions. The Server and Tools divisions I mentioned already. The Business Solutions one has a lot of potential: Microsoft owns some pretty nifty tools there, like Axapta or Navision. While their current offer in the CRM area is rather confused at this moment, expect them to clarify and expand it in the next couple of years.
After reading TFA I read the actual patent (well, what I could get from the legalese). And, from my (admittedly limited) understanding of IPv6, I couldn't see the issue. So I went to check the fine links in the FA.
Surprise, the name of the guy that came up with the original complaint sounded familiar.
So I did a Google on it, and found the article I remembered (he's mentioned somewhere close to the end).
I'm not shure that trying to render broken HTML would be in the users interest
Come on. Most users will prefer a page which gives them the information they want, even if it's not precisely aligned, or uses a default font, to a page that only displays some cryptic error message.
*You* might like gracefull fails, but to a user it just looks like an ugly page.
Graceful degradation and graceful failure are basic principles of good software design. It doesn't specifically apply to web pages or browsers; any product that needs to be used in a production environment, or which is expected to have a large user mass should consider possible error conditions and try to deal with them nicely. You must also consider the capabilities of your target users; is there a point in displaying a big error message for a user that doesn't own the web page containing the error and can't do anything about it?
Look it up in an HCI book - if you got any:P
I'm talking about professional software, not applets, toy applications or web pages some amateur knocks out in his basement. If you don't have the time or inclination to handle graceful degradation, of course, it's your privilege. But don't be surprised when users will reject your product, because it won't do what they want.
How is it any different? With HTML, the user is the web developer, just as the programmer is the user of C or C++. The person viewing the page is analogous to the user who uses the program after it has been compiled
It may surprise you, but there are browser users out there that aren't web developers;).
You're right, the person viewing the page is analogous to the user of the program. But the user of the program does not compile it, he uses it! That's why the compiler should be as strict as possible with errors, but the program itself should fail gracefully. And that's why the browser, which is instrumental in the usage of the web page (as opposed to its development) should be as resilient and forgiving as possible.
While few browsers are or have ever been 100% compliant on EVERY DETAIL of a published standard, only Microsoft (of the remaining major broswer vendors) has a history of DELIBERATLY ignoring standards or DELIBERATLY incorporating non-standard extensions into their browsers. They've been doing this since IE 1.0.
And, no, I'm not a knee-jerk "Microsoft sucks!" person. But the history here speaks for itself.
That's really funny, because history tells us exactly the opposite. Either you're too young and don't know your history, or you're intentionally spreading FUD. Please read about Netscape and tags like blink, spacer, multicol, center, keygen and others, for example here or, to see how the problem was regarded at the time, here.
So, do you think you may be a knee-jerk "Microsoft sucks!" person after all ?
Compilers shouldn't, because their user is a developer and he can (and should) fix the problems. But browsers should indeed render broken code, or make a best effort thereof. It's called graceful failure and it's a very important characteristic of production-strength software.
The user of the browser isn't the web page developer, and he isn't interested in the minuties of CSS and W3C standards. The user wants to see the page, and the browser should show it to him instead of crapping out with weird and useless errors.
We could argue that a resilient browser encourages bad code development habits. That may be true, for bad or amateur web developers, but it's still not the fault of the users. There are tools and validators that allow good devs to check the correctness of their code and fix it before deployment.
people demand entertainment with relatively high production values,
I can't believe you said that. Ok, maybe slick looking, but anyone with some practice can get that down pretty well after a few tries.
Yet it's true; "some practice" is not enough to get something compelling. And knowing how to use the tools doesn't an artist make.
Look at other similar forms of art where production is even easier than with movies: music, or say literature. Writing your own novel and publishing it on the web is trivially easy, yet professional authors and publishers still do good business. The reason is that an amazing amount of the material written by amateurs and available on the web is mind-numbingly bad. The extra effort required to get your book professionally published filters out a lot of the chaff; editors at publishing houses do a lot of extra filtering. As a result, published books are usually of a much higher quality than what you can find on fan web sites (of course, some exceptions do exist). The same reasoning applies here.
Who uses the internet on there Pocket PC? It takes way to long just to type in a web address!
You don't have to type the URL every time you go to a site, you know? That's what favorites/bookmarks and links are for. I mostly use the PocketPC to check my favorite sites and not for general browsing. And for this type of usage it's great.
That would be pretty useful for wearable devices; for example, a smart watch (a la Microsoft's SPOT) could interface with a display device in a pair of sunglasses or with a pair of earrings doubling as speakers. Since it's not wireless, hacking into your "personal" network would require direct contact (much less stealthy).
This worries me more that the prospect of global warming, the prospect that weather is becoming more extreme
IANAM (eteorologist), but that's the way I'd expect global warming to work: not a straightforward uniform increase in temperature everywhere, but an increase of the amount of energy in the system. That would indeed lead to more extreme weather, bigger (and more frequent) storms, and, paradoxically, may cause colder weather than usual in some areas.
As I've mentioned before in this thread, the bundling is an unfair advantage, it isn't simply a guarantee of market share. But when the apps have even near feature parity, the bundled apps win with a commanding advantage.
You have mentioned that before; I'm not sure I agree about the unfair part of it, but that's another discussion. The point is that, if one of the apps is superior, people will choose it (see Firefox), even if it's not bundled. If apps have the same features, there is no advantage in competition, and the whole argument becomes moot. So, it seems to me that the European Commission decision is bad for consumers, both directly (because they have to pay more to get the same features - not to mention that in the case of RealPlayer, it's arguable that WMP is better and certainly less intrusive, so consumers pay more for less) and indirectly (because it encourages companies to litigate instead of innovating).
Once WMP is always available, [...] what else can those businesses do but target it?
IMO, this shouldn't matter; the European Commission ought to care first about the consumers and not about the businesses (especially American ones). I don't see how my computer experience or money spent are improved by the decision.
I don't see bundling as a problem for me (a customer). If I get a computer running the Reduced Media version I'm inconvenienced in any number of ways. I can't play my media out of the box; I need to waste time finding a player and then maybe spend extra money to purchase a commercial player from one of Microsoft's competitors (note that I also pay extra if I buy an OEM pre-installed player).
Some will argue that competition suffers - but look at Firefox and Opera! By offering better quality and security than IE, they justify the extra effort and maybe cost needed to download and install them. And they're doing a great job competing with IE. That's what WMP competitors should do: instead of looking for bureaucratic solutions, they should offer better quality. From what I've seen, this is not happening.
Probably; it would also be unusable until I installed and configured some suitable OS. Now, there was a time when I enjoyed putting together PCs, and fiddling with jumpers, interrupts, drivers and config files. Believe me though, doing your own installs loses its glamour over time. Nowadays I kinda found a life outside that and I consider the extra money I pay for a pre-installed OS well worth the time and aggravation I'm saving. YMMV, of course.
This kind of "insight" can be applied to almost every company, and it's about as good as Colin Fry's cold reading
Looking for previous Malone predictions I found this gem where he predicts the death of Apple. I quote from the full article:
"No, I think that if Jobs proved anything, it's that the core body of Macolytes is pretty inviolable. It would be very damn hard to lose them. The question is: Can he do much more than he's done right now? He's up against 300 companies. No matter how clever he is, the combined creativity and brainpower of 300 companies ultimately will defeat him. He didn't believe that the first time around. I think he knows that now. That's why I think he's positioned Apple for the big exit. I suspect he's shopping the place around. I hear rumors to that effect but I couldn't confirm them. If he was smart he'd do the same thing as NeXT. Remember, NeXT almost died, he managed to go sideways with it, establish it with a certain amount of prestige but not a lot of long-term potential, and sold it to Apple. He ended up being a hero, but he came within weeks of being a goat. If he can sell Apple and make a ton of money, then he becomes the savior."
Actually, while Microsoft may have posted record profits, they've also noted that their sales of Windows have actually declined.
Ok, I read the article you suggested and it doesn't say what you think it says. On the contrary, the Windows for PC division is forecast to have a sale increase of 5 percent in the quarter, and the server division is forecast to increase by 9 percent. You may be confused by the fact that the sales growth is lower (compared to last year's 21 percent).
The Office sales have declined (no new version since 2003), and are forecast to further decline by 5 percent.
Slashdot Mirror
You can say:
"Yes, they released _ONE_ OSS app"
You can say that, indeed, but you'd be lying. Of course, it's lying for the good cause, so it doesn't matter.
Ummm, how about doing exactly what they did, but anonymously, so that we know they didn't just do it for the positive press?
Reputation is one of the main reasons proponents of open source use to justify giving your code away. And yet, when MS does exactly that, you complain. If you're consistent, we should also hear you rant about the fact that Linus Torvalds signed his code and didn't release the Linux kernel anonymously. Well?
I think you're both to some extent missing the point about the true disconnect between percentage of income and the amount of sacrifice you are making when giving to charity.
The OP said "If you put a quarter in the cup [...] you're donating a larger fraction of your income to charity than Bill Gates". The assertion seemed to me to be orders of magnitude out of whack, so I decided to do a quick and dirty verification. That was the entire point of my post.
It's not difficult to do a back of the envelope calculation before posting. It's not difficult to do at least a perfunctory check of your facts (Google is your friend!) before posting. I know that's Slashdot, but still, this gleeful indifference to facts annoys me a lot (must be my engineer brain).
Of course, if you're living at poverty level, donating even a small percentage of your income is painful. My example was however really contrived: I tried to give the OP the benefit of all possible doubt, and forced all assumptions in his favor.
If however we consider a more reasonable example, say somebody who makes $50000 an year and eats once a month at McDonalds, we end up with a donation of 3 bucks/year, a percentage of 0.006 % of the income. I don't really see it as a sacrifice - certainly not one that allows the OP to pretend to any moral superiority over Gates who donated "only" 27 billions.
If you put a quarter in the cup at mcdonalds each time you get a big Mac, chances are you're donating a larger fraction of your income to charity than Bill Gates does. Sure, it's better to donate something than nothing, but as the old saying goes, it's not what you give, it's what you sacrifice. The point of the comment was that Bill Gates can't make up for all the wrong he's done by giving away what is, to him, a pittance.
Not that I don't like a good rant, but let's run some numbers.
Assuming you eat 3 times a day at McDonalds, you end up giving 75 c a day, or less than $275 a year. Assuming you reached 49 years (as old as Bill Gates) despite your terrible dietary habits, and you started working at 20, you ended up donating less than $8000. Even if you're at poverty level, that is you make $9827/year, your total income over this period would be close to 285000 dollars; so you're giving about 2% of your total income. Bill Gates donated close to $27 billion, and has a net worth of about 47 billion, so that's about 36% of his net worth. Looks like Gates got you beat here too.
Until your windows install craps out and starts stalling for over a minute at the welcome screen.
You probably have some service that fails and timeouts at startup. Check your event logs to identify the failing service, and fix it. This behavior may for example happen if you removed some hardware but for didn't properly uninstall all software. There may be other causes too, but the event log should tell you what's going on.
They were also professions largely consisting of two classes of people: the idle rich and the dedicated artist who was willing to live in poverty. Copyright law has made it possible for normal people to at least make some money off of their creative works
Or an artist could find a rich patron; somebody willing to pay for the artist's subsistence in exchange for art. The result is, of course, control over the artist's output. So we see (as in many classical musical and literary works) ridiculously exaggerated flattery of the artist's Maecenas, and uncritical support of the particular political or economical position of the above mentioned patron.
I don't believe it would be good for the society to return to this kind of situation: consider that the ones that can afford supporting artists are exactly the ones that shouldn't be in control of even more propaganda tools.
I always thought it was amusing that Apple names their OS releases after fast, nimble predators. While MS names theirs after the prey.
So what does that mean?
It means you don't know what you're talking about. The only Microsoft code name that could be a big cat prey was Impala (NT 4 embedded). You may say so's Longhorn, but the origin of the code name is in reality the name of a saloon positioned between the Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, in Whistler BC. Look here for a more complete list of internal code names.
Guess what? Many of the people who managed to write operating systems in assembler in a few K in the 80s were also "unqualified amateurs".
Yes, that's what many of them were. Don't let yourself be unnecessarily impressed: an OS that fits in a few kb is really not such a big deal - and FWIW, I was one of those guys, having built my own Z80 computer and written the software for it (including keyboard, video, casette and floppy drivers, a nice monitor with a few debug capabilities and a small assembler). Being a professional programmer requires more than enthusiasm.
But the problem for Microsoft is that it's basically a house of cards. Every other facet of Microsoft loses money other than Office and Windows.
I'm sorry, but you're uninformed. It's really easy to research the facts a bit, rather than just parroting slashbot folklore. Find the numbers as presented by Microsoft here. Or, if you want a simplified presentation look here for a nice graph with Microsoft's revenue per division. Note that four out of seven divisions are profitable (and, for the last quarter, the XBox group was profitable too, but that's probably a glitch produced by Halo 2). Also, note that the Server and Tools division had revenue of $2,235 million for the 3 month ending September 04, comparable with either Client (that's mostly Windows) at $2,993 million and Information Worker (that's Office) at $2,560 million
If either of those fail, the entire company would fail with it.
Wrong again; the most successful division, Client, has an operating income of $2,392 million. Microsoft's total operating income is over $4 billion. If the Client division were to bring no income whatsoever, Microsoft's total operating income would still be almost 2 billion for the quarter.
That's why it is so desperate to do something different, e.g., Xbox, WebTV, WinCE, search, Windows Media Video 9/HD-DVD, etc. Thus, if Microsoft was forced to lower prices on Office/Windows, they'd have to start dumping all of their money losing areas to stay afloat.
Bad analysis, based on ignorance and hear-say. You're only looking to consumer-side stuff and ignoring all corporation-level work. Note that Microsoft is pushing a lot in the corporate space, with the Server and Tools and Business Solutions divisions. The Server and Tools divisions I mentioned already. The Business Solutions one has a lot of potential: Microsoft owns some pretty nifty tools there, like Axapta or Navision. While their current offer in the CRM area is rather confused at this moment, expect them to clarify and expand it in the next couple of years.
After reading TFA I read the actual patent (well, what I could get from the legalese). And, from my (admittedly limited) understanding of IPv6, I couldn't see the issue. So I went to check the fine links in the FA.
Surprise, the name of the guy that came up with the original complaint sounded familiar.
So I did a Google on it, and found the article I remembered (he's mentioned somewhere close to the end).
Looks to me like a lot of FUD.
I'm not shure that trying to render broken HTML would be in the users interest
:P
Come on. Most users will prefer a page which gives them the information they want, even if it's not precisely aligned, or uses a default font, to a page that only displays some cryptic error message.
*You* might like gracefull fails, but to a user it just looks like an ugly page.
Graceful degradation and graceful failure are basic principles of good software design. It doesn't specifically apply to web pages or browsers; any product that needs to be used in a production environment, or which is expected to have a large user mass should consider possible error conditions and try to deal with them nicely. You must also consider the capabilities of your target users; is there a point in displaying a big error message for a user that doesn't own the web page containing the error and can't do anything about it?
Look it up in an HCI book - if you got any
I'm talking about professional software, not applets, toy applications or web pages some amateur knocks out in his basement. If you don't have the time or inclination to handle graceful degradation, of course, it's your privilege. But don't be surprised when users will reject your product, because it won't do what they want.
How is it any different? With HTML, the user is the web developer, just as the programmer is the user of C or C++. The person viewing the page is analogous to the user who uses the program after it has been compiled
;) .
It may surprise you, but there are browser users out there that aren't web developers
You're right, the person viewing the page is analogous to the user of the program. But the user of the program does not compile it, he uses it! That's why the compiler should be as strict as possible with errors, but the program itself should fail gracefully. And that's why the browser, which is instrumental in the usage of the web page (as opposed to its development) should be as resilient and forgiving as possible.
While few browsers are or have ever been 100% compliant on EVERY DETAIL of a published standard, only Microsoft (of the remaining major broswer vendors) has a history of DELIBERATLY ignoring standards or DELIBERATLY incorporating non-standard extensions into their browsers. They've been doing this since IE 1.0.
And, no, I'm not a knee-jerk "Microsoft sucks!" person. But the history here speaks for itself.
That's really funny, because history tells us exactly the opposite. Either you're too young and don't know your history, or you're intentionally spreading FUD. Please read about Netscape and tags like blink, spacer, multicol, center, keygen and others, for example here or, to see how the problem was regarded at the time, here.
So, do you think you may be a knee-jerk "Microsoft sucks!" person after all ?
Browsers shouldn't render broken HTML.
Compilers shouldn't compile broken code
Compilers shouldn't, because their user is a developer and he can (and should) fix the problems. But browsers should indeed render broken code, or make a best effort thereof. It's called graceful failure and it's a very important characteristic of production-strength software.
The user of the browser isn't the web page developer, and he isn't interested in the minuties of CSS and W3C standards. The user wants to see the page, and the browser should show it to him instead of crapping out with weird and useless errors.
We could argue that a resilient browser encourages bad code development habits. That may be true, for bad or amateur web developers, but it's still not the fault of the users. There are tools and validators that allow good devs to check the correctness of their code and fix it before deployment.
equal rites
I thought it was a Terry Pratchett reference. =P
Tne same spelling trick was used in an old Asimov story "Legal Rites"
people demand entertainment with relatively high production values,
I can't believe you said that. Ok, maybe slick looking, but anyone with some practice can get that down pretty well after a few tries.
Yet it's true; "some practice" is not enough to get something compelling. And knowing how to use the tools doesn't an artist make.
Look at other similar forms of art where production is even easier than with movies: music, or say literature. Writing your own novel and publishing it on the web is trivially easy, yet professional authors and publishers still do good business. The reason is that an amazing amount of the material written by amateurs and available on the web is mind-numbingly bad. The extra effort required to get your book professionally published filters out a lot of the chaff; editors at publishing houses do a lot of extra filtering. As a result, published books are usually of a much higher quality than what you can find on fan web sites (of course, some exceptions do exist). The same reasoning applies here.
Who uses the internet on there Pocket PC? It takes way to long just to type in a web address!
You don't have to type the URL every time you go to a site, you know? That's what favorites/bookmarks and links are for. I mostly use the PocketPC to check my favorite sites and not for general browsing. And for this type of usage it's great.
What's the point beyond the coolness factor?
That would be pretty useful for wearable devices; for example, a smart watch (a la Microsoft's SPOT) could interface with a display device in a pair of sunglasses or with a pair of earrings doubling as speakers. Since it's not wireless, hacking into your "personal" network would require direct contact (much less stealthy).
Chess is fun
Bah, chess...
This worries me more that the prospect of global warming, the prospect that weather is becoming more extreme
IANAM (eteorologist), but that's the way I'd expect global warming to work: not a straightforward uniform increase in temperature everywhere, but an increase of the amount of energy in the system. That would indeed lead to more extreme weather, bigger (and more frequent) storms, and, paradoxically, may cause colder weather than usual in some areas.
As I've mentioned before in this thread, the bundling is an unfair advantage, it isn't simply a guarantee of market share. But when the apps have even near feature parity, the bundled apps win with a commanding advantage.
You have mentioned that before; I'm not sure I agree about the unfair part of it, but that's another discussion. The point is that, if one of the apps is superior, people will choose it (see Firefox), even if it's not bundled. If apps have the same features, there is no advantage in competition, and the whole argument becomes moot. So, it seems to me that the European Commission decision is bad for consumers, both directly (because they have to pay more to get the same features - not to mention that in the case of RealPlayer, it's arguable that WMP is better and certainly less intrusive, so consumers pay more for less) and indirectly (because it encourages companies to litigate instead of innovating).
Once WMP is always available, [...] what else can those businesses do but target it?
IMO, this shouldn't matter; the European Commission ought to care first about the consumers and not about the businesses (especially American ones). I don't see how my computer experience or money spent are improved by the decision.
I don't see bundling as a problem for me (a customer). If I get a computer running the Reduced Media version I'm inconvenienced in any number of ways. I can't play my media out of the box; I need to waste time finding a player and then maybe spend extra money to purchase a commercial player from one of Microsoft's competitors (note that I also pay extra if I buy an OEM pre-installed player).
Some will argue that competition suffers - but look at Firefox and Opera! By offering better quality and security than IE, they justify the extra effort and maybe cost needed to download and install them. And they're doing a great job competing with IE. That's what WMP competitors should do: instead of looking for bureaucratic solutions, they should offer better quality. From what I've seen, this is not happening.
Your PC without Windows would have been cheaper
Probably; it would also be unusable until I installed and configured some suitable OS. Now, there was a time when I enjoyed putting together PCs, and fiddling with jumpers, interrupts, drivers and config files. Believe me though, doing your own installs loses its glamour over time. Nowadays I kinda found a life outside that and I consider the extra money I pay for a pre-installed OS well worth the time and aggravation I'm saving. YMMV, of course.
This kind of "insight" can be applied to almost every company, and it's about as good as Colin Fry's cold reading
Looking for previous Malone predictions I found this gem where he predicts the death of Apple. I quote from the full article:
"No, I think that if Jobs proved anything, it's that the core body of Macolytes is pretty inviolable. It would be very damn hard to lose them. The question is: Can he do much more than he's done right now? He's up against 300 companies. No matter how clever he is, the combined creativity and brainpower of 300 companies ultimately will defeat him. He didn't believe that the first time around. I think he knows that now. That's why I think he's positioned Apple for the big exit. I suspect he's shopping the place around. I hear rumors to that effect but I couldn't confirm them. If he was smart he'd do the same thing as NeXT. Remember, NeXT almost died, he managed to go sideways with it, establish it with a certain amount of prestige but not a lot of long-term potential, and sold it to Apple. He ended up being a hero, but he came within weeks of being a goat. If he can sell Apple and make a ton of money, then he becomes the savior."
Actually, while Microsoft may have posted record profits, they've also noted that their sales of Windows have actually declined.
Ok, I read the article you suggested and it doesn't say what you think it says. On the contrary, the Windows for PC division is forecast to have a sale increase of 5 percent in the quarter, and the server division is forecast to increase by 9 percent. You may be confused by the fact that the sales growth is lower (compared to last year's 21 percent).
The Office sales have declined (no new version since 2003), and are forecast to further decline by 5 percent.