The European Union says Microsoft is still abusing its monopoly with Windows Media Player. The press release can be found here.
EU Says Microsoft Still at Risk for Antitrust
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Adam Scheinberg
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Uh,okay, MS settled with the US Federal Gov. by getting a wrist slap. What in the hell makes the EU think it will do any better. The EU is a joke.
I agree wholeheartedly. As a French man, I can say that EU is not really a political instance, but much more a political trick to get more money for big companies, banks and governments. How can we name an “Union” whitout unified political instances and a strong unified Army ?
To go back to the main Subject, Microsoft should not be worried. EU has no p”olitical weight” and can’t harm a multinational, all the more so as Microsoft is well supported by the US government.
Microsoft could be endangered by the awaken of the “national” feelings. That what we can see in Germany with SuSE Linux.
Christ on a bike, if you’re going to comment, don’t appear to be a clueless moron.
The EU threat is very real. Unlike the USA, the EU is likely to take the Microsoft problem very seriously indeed. The maximum fine is 10% of global turnover, which is not a piffling sum even to Microsoft. In addition, the EU may well require Microsoft to open up APIs. This would be a massive help to linux coders in trying to get linux and Microsoft products to talk to each other. At the moment, protocols like SMB have to be reverse engineered.
As the car manufacturers found out, the EU is serious when it comes to dealing with corporate malpractice. It’s a shame the USA didn’t have the balls to do what the EU is doing.
At least someone is doing something before MS kills Real a la Netscape. Considering how Microsoft is flaunting the antitrust laws by, having been fund guilty, continuing with exactly the same, illegal, policies without even a thought of what they are doing is wrong. I hope that MS gets treated like any other criminal that continues with there crimes at the first oppertunity without any remorse what so ever and gets the book thrown at them. They won’t, of course, it will be at most another wrist slap.
Yes totothemacho, I do believe that “National,” feelings of countries like Germany who have adopted SuSE is more of an endangerment than the EU anti-trust. What I don’t understand is that the EU is saying a proprietary OS needs to reveal their network interface info to competitors??? Maybe they have yet to define “proprietary,” as the red-tape and bureaucracy is taking most of their time. It seems to me (while I do not like MS, I have to defend them on this point) a company who makes a product ought to be able to include or exclude any product they so choose (i.e. Apple). Windows Media Player is there because MS makes the player. It does not discourage or prevent other media players from being used (i.e. Real Player, QuickTime, etc.). One must know how to USE a computer in order to change the default from WMP to another program. MS is not responsible for people who do not know how to do so. RTFM…plus Windows is so easy to both learn and use anyone who cannot achieve the above should be thought as nothing more than a social liability in the eyes of any civilized country.
MS kills Real? Have you ever used it? No one in their right mind would use it – it’s terrible. I know I’m coming from a geek perspective, but even normal users hate it. The people at my school’s computer lab always complain because the icon is always blinking with some stupid message (usually an ad) and it always has to have a tray icon. I think that Real is killing themselves by making an annoying product that no on wants to use.
Salmacis,
The EU does not have the jurisdiction to open MS API’s. This “lawsuit” is laughable at best. MS will not pay “10% of global turnover,” to the EU. MS will pull it’s business out of the EU Market for before that would happen. Like I said previously, the EU is a joke. The EU is not sovereign except to those who agree to be associated and controlled by them. MS falls under US jurisdiction, and since we do not recognize the EU as a sovereign governing body or have extradition treaties with the EU, the EU has no chance in hell of enforcing anything it finds in a court. They will not be able to freeze assets of MS, they will not be able to prevent the sale of MS products as trade in Europe is not governed by the EU either. The EU can recommend what they will and find MS guilty or not in their court, but it amounts to a pile of useless crap.
Try telling that to Genaral Electric and Honeywell and the others that the EU steped in, so take my word for it, the EU is no joke, Microsoft have to go along with whats happening, also, Micosoft wont pull out of the EU market, that would be stupid as the EU is one of there biggest market, if not biggest, so them pulling out of the EU would benefit the EU and Linux.
lol, is MS pulls out of the EU, its lost already 40% of its manufacturing and production base, if it pulls out of the EU, 20% of its profits will disappear, MS’s largest hardware factories are in Poland which in about the next 6mnths is going to be part of the EU, Ireland is MS’s largest distribution base out side of the USA, so if MS were to pull out of the EU, well they’ve basically shot them selves in the foot, MS needs the EU, because of the cheap land costs for factories and they need the Eastern EU countries because labour is cheap about £2,300 (approx £4,500) per yr for each employee, when u compare tht to the USA average of about £28,600 (approx. $49,400) you can hire about 10 EU employees to every USA employee, do the math MS is more likely to pull out of the US than the EU.
“At least someone is doing something before MS kills Real a la Netscape.”
Who gives a shit about Real. Its the potential loss of QuickTime as a result of microsoft’s anticompetative actions that is the real concern.
The EU lawyers are discussing the wrong issue. Like other posters have noted, a penalty of 10% of Microsoft total revenues is not a crushing blow (that would amount to something like 10 billion $ maximum ?) considering they have approximately 40 billions in cash.
The real problem is that computer shops make people believe they have to pay for Windows if they want to be able to use their brand new computer. Most of us (OS News readers) know this is a scam, after all, we do use other operating systems on our PCs.
I think a lot of computer users throughout the world will have a sigh of relief the day Microsoft and OEMs such as Dell, IBM or HP are sued (and found guilty) for conspiracy to commit fraud, multiple counts of extortion (and in the US, violation of the RICO statutes).
Which IT consultants advised the European Union on the matter at hand, I have no idea. They certainly picked the lesser of many evils. For the EU to be credible, they should start taking care of the problems denounced by consumer advocates (or other groups of concerned citizens), instead of trying to please some corporations. Until now, when it comes to the software industry, the EU experts seem to deliberate in the stratosphere, somewhere neither Joe Blow nor Jane Doe have access.
lol, is MS pulls out of the EU, its lost already 40% of its manufacturing and production base, if it pulls out of the EU, 20% of its profits will disappear, MS’s largest hardware factories are in Poland which in about the next 6mnths is going to be part of the EU,
MS’ hardware factories? They moved their XBox manufacturing to Asia, why not the rest of their hardware? (Never mind that hardware is not a big market for them, and they just killed a good amount of their hardware production by killing off the Sidewinder line). Not only that, but if Poland isn’t part of the EU now, that just gives them more time to do it.
Ireland is MS’s largest distribution base out side of the USA, so if MS were to pull out of the EU, well they’ve basically shot them selves in the foot,
If MS stops distributing in the EU, why would they need a distribution base in the EU? Oops, no need for that any more, either. Setup shop in Korea or some other Asian country to handle Asian distribution, though more than likely they already have that.
MS needs the EU, because of the cheap land costs for factories and they need the Eastern EU countries because labour is cheap about £2,300 (approx £4,500) per yr for each employee, when u compare tht to the USA average of about £28,600 (approx. $49,400) you can hire about 10 EU employees to every USA employee, do the math MS is more likely to pull out of the US than the EU.
They farm out more work to India and Asia than they do to the EU already, because it’s MUCH cheaper in either of those areas. Plus, if you cut out EU distribution, you also reduce localization costs significantly (although Asian localization tends to be more expensive) by cutting off a few languages (excepting Spanish and Portugese) that you might only need in some parts of Africa (oh, and I guess you need French in Canada).
Not to mention that I know plenty of people in the US that are willing to do a hell of a lot for $49K/year, it’s just a matter of where in the country you setup shop and what level of training you’re willing to invest in (and hell, if you pay someone $30K/year then you can spend $15K/year in training per person and still make money, and have plenty of candidates; why do any of that, though, when you can pay people $10K/year in India?).
Speaking of Real Player, I have found a very nice, very light-weight alternative to using the actual Real Player.
Do a google on Real Alternative (or it may be in the archives for betanews.com), it’s a name for an actual app. Basically the guy took a WMP6 type of interface and integrated some Real Player dlls, which gives you the ability to play Real files on this very small, and very nice, little media player.
“We don’t want them to reveal the entire working of their system,” Lueder [EU Spokesman] said. “We only want them to reveal that [server] protocol information that is required for them to fully interoperate.”
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,59923,00.html
http://www.msnbc.com/news/948902.asp
by farming work out into india and asia, and using Sweater shop style employment, which MS will inevitably do, they’ll be breaking human rights acts across the world, and with MS being a US company they hav to ahear to the Geneva Convention so they might find it hard to move all operations out to Asia
If MS doesn’t kill Real, hopefully somebody else will.
If there’s one domain where the EU is not a joke, it is precisely anti-trust legislation. The commission anti-trust bureaucracy has a history of effectively and routinely fining multinational corporations for $100M+. It has killed a merger between two major, purely American companies, General Electric and Honeywell, even though the merger had been given a greenlight by the US DoJ. It has striken indifferently pan-european companies, European national champions, American based global corporations and Japanese industrial giants alike.
And no need to say that the notion of Microsoft just killing its European business is purely academic.
RE: Gil Bates (IP: —.talisman-energy.com)
As usual, you are the reasoning power within a storm of trolls. I completely agree. Microsoft *SHOULD* open up their protocols and allow all and sundry to implement and thus allow better interoperability.
I want Microsoft to compete, not only “who can make the obscure and undocumented protocol” but on purely on product quality. Just take a hint at UNIX, there are various implementations of the NFS v3 protocol of all varying quality. Some good, others absolutely crap, yet, all of them compete even though they are of the same protocol. Another one would be LDAP, there are a number of opensource implementions plus SUN One Directory Server, again, all competing but based off the same openstandard.
If Microsoft products are so much superior, as they claim, open up those protocols and lets see Microsoft compete on merit rather than hiding behind undocumented features like some sort of coward.
Windows Media Player is free and the Windows OS depends on it, the same that QuickTime is free and the Mac OS depends on it too. I do not quite understand this people demanding a cut down OS without imaging services, HTML rendering services… We could very well demand not to have sound playing services, font rendering services, 3D rendering services or fucking windows and icons laying around.
What pisses me of is not that Windows is tied to WMP, but that WMP is tied to Windows and therefore, Microsoft uses its dominant position to require having Windows to see certain falvors of Windows media. Where the heck is my WM9 player for Mac OS!!!!
And BTW, Netscape v4.x was such a load of shit that even Netscape Corp. realized it had to rewrite it from zero. Mozilla is grrrrreat, Netscape v4.x should have never existed since it is quite responsible for filling all the web for obscure javascript resizing hacks and all other sorts of html tickling. The same that QuickTime for Windows sucks at performance. Let’s not mistake anti-monopoly with inefficience.
The EU could use its freedom of choice to “simply” switch all government computing to an open source platform. Let M$ worry about the concequences and perhaps they will get their act together.
The EU has generally acted to protect and to enhance the rights of its citizens.. and earned my trust for doing so. Yes, its a monolithic, wasteful, sometimes ludicrous organization but its beliefs and its heart are all right
I look forward to seeing a real remedy to MS monopolism.
…the worst in history|
Wow bebo, you would think that the beaconing light of freedom wouldn’t be such a “Joke,” oh wait…it is jealousy.
The victims (Vietnam, Lybia, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Angola, Panama, Afghanistan, Irak, Irian Jaya, Salvador, …, gosh, the list is too long) of the US government thirst for blood wouldn’t talk about “the beaconing light of freedom”.
I believe they would rather say “the burning napalm flames of foreign mercenaries paid by greedy corporations”. I doubt there are many countries that are jealous of the fact that South East Asia is littered with landmines dropped by US pilots during more than ten years. I’m not quite sure that many envy Central America for being the playing field of all the wackos paid by the CIA.
the beaconing light of freedom
You mean the statue of liberty? Wasn’t that donated by the french – oops I mean those yellow surrender monkeys (sic). I bet that if Thomas Jefferson were alive today he’d move to france.
Wow bebo, you would think that the beaconing light of freedom wouldn’t be such a “Joke,” oh wait…it is jealousy.
oohh my friend.. keep your american dream close to you.
…keep dreaming.
For Mark Gruber
you forgot Argentina and Venezuela.