News Microsoft loses EU antitrust case

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/09/18/microsoft_loses_eu_antitrust_case/1

Coming as no shock to many around the world, Microsoft has lost its appeal in the European Union antitrust case.

 

Personally I could never agree with the ruling, to me a point of a business is to make a profit (so long as you don't break the law in doing so).
Adding functionality to your product is just plain old good business practice, should we sue Volvo for adding seatbelts to their cars?

Microsoft do not force you into using their media player, email client, internet browser or even windows explorer, they are built in applications that you as the consumer have the choice of using.

This is much different to the Intel case, where they used unfair business practices to push out the competition.

 

I think the key here is 'precedent'. This is such a high-level court that I'm worried that they would find against any appeal just to uphold it's reputation.

Unfortunately the media and the pressure group(s) (is there more than one?) who faught for this havan't taken into account what affect this will have for the end user. All they say is that we're going to have more choice. I disagree. In my mind the outcome is going to be higher software costs and more delay for releases in Europe. I will put money on the fact if Microsoft do remove WMP (for example) from Windows over here, then they'll just replace it with a link to download a copy. 99% of normal users then just downloading it. All the people who care already use Firefox or Foobar etc etc.

 

Isn't this like what happened with Internet Explorer? Microsoft was told that it was unfair to netscape and other competitors to offer IE for free.

 

and yet it's still in Vista isn't it?

i don't understand why the judge rules, but nothing happens......... am i missing something?

 

I share your sentiment, but browser and email client really make squat all difference to most people. I think the bigger issue is that when you go to Dell, HP, et al, your options for OS are Mircosoft and Microsoft (with that little Ubuntu thing being the very recent exception, and I could swear that's US-only anyways).

 

And whose fault is that?

The 'competition' don't exactly provide much to compete with Windows, there isn't much of an alternative - At least not a widely useful one.

I can never understand why being the dominant force in a market immediately makes it fair-game to accuse a company of monopoly. Offering a more fleshed-out, comprehensive and compatible product doesn't seem like unfair practice to me.

On the point of Inter-operability.. Don't network administrators like to keep things as simple as possible in a typical business network? Using uniform DELL/HP systems of similar spec, bought in bulk; and a whole network running as few different operating systems as possible, with a uniform management system like Novell ZENworks etc?

I'd imagine Windows interoperates just fine with *NIX in a network environment and I can't imagine many SysAdmins being eager to install a variety of OSes on a business network just for the spice of life..

Maybe I'm missing the point, but the way I see it is that if the competition can't engineer their software to work with the already market-dominant systems provided by Microsoft, without Microsoft making it easy for them, then they're in the wrong market.
If you can't offer a better product and market it sufficiently well, then you lose - Handicapping the market leader as if it were a game of golf doesn't seem right to me in capitalist business.
If it benefits the consumer, then great, but I can't see it making much difference except to set another legal precedent.

 

Probably the judge talked about specifically at Internet Explorer 6... so that is why they released IE 7 (it's a just a guess)

 

With out Internet Explorer how would the user download a different browser.

Another question. Does Apple provide a browser, media player ect with its OS? If it does then surely thats unfair too.

 

Part of the problem is that without IE windows wouldn't work its that heavily integrated. This seems a moral judgement more than anything, because of MS position it could kill any secondary software company in the world. If a decent cd burner was integrated pop nero folds, a web browser was integrated pop netscape ceased, although the code survived it only resurged due to the fact that MS got lazy since it was unchallenged in a monopoly position.
If MS is forced to evolve its products it benefits every one (inc MS) IE7 only came out becuase FF started to erode its position MS would have continued onwards with the security time bomb that was IE6 for ever if there was no real competition, which of course there isn't since it wiped it out.