Dooey Jo wrote:Wait a second, does the EU want to fine MS because they're shipping the Media Player with Windows? Was that the best reason they could come up with? When I first saw the headlines in the news I thought it was more of the usual monopoly they always get in trouble for, but it turns out it is because of WMP?
Not just because of that, but because of MS aim of squeezing everyone else who is in the media player business out of it, the way they did to Netscape in the browser wars in the 1990s. Microsoft is illegally trying to drive competition out of business. It's also trying to illegally leverage its OS monopoly into server markets (which is what half of the EU decision was all about) and if past MS behavior is any clue, they will also extend this practice into firewall and security software by "integrating" something into the OS and gradually mixing the non-essential code into essential code in such a way that it won't later be possible to remove it, and then they will bitch and moan about the authorities trying to stifle their "innovation".
Another big issue is that of the closed file formats and what is going to be adopted as industry standard, because if the proprietary WMP media formats become de facto standard, that will give MS a near-complete monopoly on digital media content the way they now have in desktop operating systems, so it's also another case of trying to illegally leverage a monopoly into related markets, and this after their current monopoly was also determined to have been acquired through illegal means.
Dooey Jo wrote:By doing this, the EU forces us that can't get anything better than a 56-k connection to use RP and therefor getting a shitload of spam and other such shit! I thought the EU was to pass a law against spam...
Tough bananas. I'm in the same position as you are, but I'd rather go without WMP than hand MS a free license to dictate what I can and can't watch and with what.
Edi
