Full FeedMicrosoft loses anti trust appeal; bye bye Media Player
The European Commission has upheld the $690m fine imposed on Microsoft in 2004 for “freezing out rivals in server software and products such as media players.” Microsoft has two months to appeal this and to extend the saga even further.
“The Court of First Instance essentially upholds the Commission’s decision finding that Microsoft abused its dominant position,” the court’s statement said.
Microsoft now has to pay 80% of the Commission’s legal costs, and has been ordered to make a version of its Windows operating system available without Microsoft’s Media Player software. Microsoft was forced to pay fines of 280m € over 6 months in 2006 for failing to comply with the 2004 ruling; so I assume that they will be doing that this time.
It does seem a bit of a waste of time when the Commission’s competition commissioner is quoted as saying, “the victory is “bittersweet”, as software customers still have no more choice than they did three years ago.”
Via [BBC]
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Not sure about the use of future tense here. Windows N (without Media Player) has been available to system integrators in Europe for some time. Sales are reported to be in the region of hundreds of licenses per year.
on September 19, 2007 at 10:38 AM - LINKThis is a slippery path…. I have never understood these complaints by Microsoft haters. Its EXTREMELY easy to customize a PC with whatever third party programs you want. You cant strip windows of every program that someone else also makes or there will be nothing remaining but the kernel, and even then someone will complain that you should use their kernel. Internet Explorer, Media Player, notepad, calculator, windows explorer, solitaire, the “themes”, basically every aspect of windows has someone else who offers a different program, so what exactly do you want Microsoft to do? Ship a 50 DVD set with every program ever made with windows or strip it down to where is completely unusable out of the box? Why isn’t everyone screaming at Apple for their practices of preventing third party apps from being easily developed or preinstalled? I think this is just a classic example of attack the big guy, and nothing more. If these other softwares were that much better people would go and get them themselves, Microsoft shouldn’t be forced to destroy themselves and bloat windows, so their competition can get easy money.
on September 21, 2007 at 02:33 PM - LINK