Score one for the EU

[ASsman]

If you haven't been watching, the European Court told M$ to stop being a monopolizing jagoff, and remove Windows Media Player from it's Windows OS. Something our courts were unable (unwilling perhaps) to do with Internet Explorer, perhaps this ruling will change things.

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Microsoft preps WMP-less Windows
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Monday 24th January 2005 19:47 GMT

Microsoft said today that it won't pursue any more appeals against an interim EU competition ruling to ship a version of Windows without Windows Media Player. In December Microsoft lost an appeal to the European Court of the First Instance and promised to ship WMP-less Windows in the EU "in January". Now we learn that OEMs will be able to receive WMP-less Windows "within the next few weeks".

At behind-closed-doors hearings in 2003 Microsoft argued, as it had before, that producing a version of Windows without Media Player was impossible. However this was undermined when Real Networks sensationally demonstrated Real Player running quite happily on an embedded version of Windows.

The full investigation into allegations of anticompetitive practices by Microsoft is expected to take five years. Last spring an interim ruling imposed a fine and some conditions on the company. Novell and long-standing Microsoft foe, trade group CCIA withdrew from the proceedings last November. CCIA realized the folly of its campaign after Microsoft paid it almost $10 million.

"Life is a constant reordering of priorities," said CCIA chief Ed Black. So true. ®
http://www.theregister.com/2005/01/24/wmpless_windows/

[Schmeltz]

What? Bribery? Anti-competitive business practices? But I thought under capitalism this sort of thing never happened! Isn't Bill Gates aware that the smartest and best people always win?

[D_Raay]

What? Bribery? Anti-competitive business practices? But I thought under capitalism this sort of thing never happened! Isn't Bill Gates aware that the smartest and best people always win?
I think every time that we see such an example we should post just like S did here.

[Funkaloyd]

MS sucks ass, but this is a stupid ruling. XP users can always install Real's spyware filled player alongside WMP and give Real all file associations.
And what's the difference between making an OS with embedded media player and an OS with an embedded file browser?

[Ali]

the hell with RealPlayer

winamp kicks the lama's ass

[Funkaloyd]

Some light alternatives:

http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303&package_id=84358&release_id=227046

[ASsman]

What? Bribery? Anti-competitive business practices? But I thought under capitalism this sort of thing never happened! Isn't Bill Gates aware that the smartest and best people always win?
Tell that to Enigma. Gates hasn't done anything immoral, atleast not in his eyes.

[Schmeltz]

Yes he has - he's transgressed the immutable principles of the free market! Somebody really ought to inform him that he's not supposed to do that; he's supposed to allow the fluctuations of the market to dictate his actions and accept defeat and oblivion if they don't favour him. It's so simple, I just can't believe he's not going along.

[EN[i]GMA]

If you haven't been watching, the European Court told M$ to stop being a monopolizing jagoff, and remove Windows Media Player from it's Windows OS. Something our courts were unable (unwilling perhaps) to do with Internet Explorer, perhaps this ruling will change things.

----------
Microsoft preps WMP-less Windows
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Monday 24th January 2005 19:47 GMT

Microsoft said today that it won't pursue any more appeals against an interim EU competition ruling to ship a version of Windows without Windows Media Player. In December Microsoft lost an appeal to the European Court of the First Instance and promised to ship WMP-less Windows in the EU "in January". Now we learn that OEMs will be able to receive WMP-less Windows "within the next few weeks".

At behind-closed-doors hearings in 2003 Microsoft argued, as it had before, that producing a version of Windows without Media Player was impossible. However this was undermined when Real Networks sensationally demonstrated Real Player running quite happily on an embedded version of Windows.

The full investigation into allegations of anticompetitive practices by Microsoft is expected to take five years. Last spring an interim ruling imposed a fine and some conditions on the company. Novell and long-standing Microsoft foe, trade group CCIA withdrew from the proceedings last November. CCIA realized the folly of its campaign after Microsoft paid it almost $10 million.

"Life is a constant reordering of priorities," said CCIA chief Ed Black. So true. ®
http://www.theregister.com/2005/01/24/wmpless_windows/

Oh thank you EU for making it even more difficult to use my operating system because now I have to download WMP, which plays 90% of the media available on the internet!

Score one for the consumer!

[EN[i]GMA]

What? Bribery? Anti-competitive business practices? But I thought under capitalism this sort of thing never happened! Isn't Bill Gates aware that the smartest and best people always win?

Who did Microsoft bribe?

And there is no such thing as anti-competitive business, other than mercantilism, in which the Microsoft did not partake in. Any business practice, short of commiting a crime is perfectly competitive.

Listen to youselves. You claim you want competition yet when someone competes to well, you complain. Which is it you want?

Read Winners, Losers and Microsoft and come back to me.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0945999801/104-7915838-1863140

And Bill Gates is enormously brilliant.

[EN[i]GMA]

I think every time that we see such an example we should post just like S did here.

Go right ahead, I'll destroy you any time.

[EN[i]GMA]

Tell that to Enigma. Gates hasn't done anything immoral, atleast not in his eyes.

What has he done that's immoral? Would you like to enlighten this heathen?

[EN[i]GMA]

Yes he has - he's transgressed the immutable principles of the free market! Somebody really ought to inform him that he's not supposed to do that; he's supposed to allow the fluctuations of the market to dictate his actions and accept defeat and oblivion if they don't favour him. It's so simple, I just can't believe he's not going along.

He played the free market perfectly. He is a true capitalist like John D. Rockerfeller.

[EN[i]GMA]

And tell me, instead of MS dominance, would a market where Linux, Microsoft and Mac all had 33% of the marketplace be better?

Where you couldn't send files to your friends because they were running a different OS? Where the computers at school were completely different than the ones at work? Where it requires 3 times the knowledge to function in society? To deal with Linux's arcane command line architecture (And I know none of you have even used Linux)? To understand all the dozens of competing file formats? All the different media types?

Is THAT what you want? Or do you just feel like bitching over the interweb?

[EN[i]GMA]

MS sucks ass, but this is a stupid ruling. XP users can always install Real's spyware filled player alongside WMP and give Real all file associations.
And what's the difference between making an OS with embedded media player and an OS with an embedded file browser?

None. Except both of them allow new users the ability to actually use their computer without having to figure out why Grandma's video won't show on the computer.

BUT NOT IN MY NAME WILL THE COMPUTER ILLITERATE BE AFFORDED AN OPPURTUNITY TO USE THEIR COMPUTER AS THEY SEE FIT!

[EN[i]GMA]

Antitrust Benefits Consumers? It Just Ain’t So!
Published in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty - January 2001
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Printable Format

Robert Litan, vice president and director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution and a former adviser to Janet Reno on the Microsoft antitrust case, recently authored the stereotypical Washington Post economic policy op-ed: virtually void of elementary economic analysis while uncritically promoting more and more government intervention (“Fair Use of Antitrust,” September 13, 2000).

Mr. Litan claims that the antitrust laws allow companies to “gain dominant positions in their markets” only “if they do so fairly.” But the word “fairness” appears nowhere in the antitrust laws; this is a recent invention of socialist-minded policy wonks like Mr. Litan. Moreover, it is extraordinarily naïve of anyone calling himself an economist to believe that such a charge would even be a desirable part of the antitrust laws: Competitors will always whine and cry about how the price-cutting, product-improving, and customer-satisfying practices of their more successful rivals are “unfair.” This in fact is the modus operandi of antitrust: The antitrust laws provide a means by which sour-grapes competitors can achieve through politics what they fail to achieve in the marketplace.

Mr. Litan commits what Hayek called the “fatal conceit” of believing that government bureaucrats, rather than entrepreneurs and consumers, are in the best position to decide what constitutes a “legitimate business purpose.” Microsoft got into trouble, he argues, because it “ran afoul of this simple maxim.” The maxim is indeed simple, but it is unequivocally false. Neither economists nor politicians nor policy wonks are capable of deciding the most “efficient” size or configuration of any business enterprise. As Ludwig von Mises once explained, “The question to be decided is: Who should determine the size of the enterprises, the consumers by their striving to buy what suits them best or the politicians who know only how to tax away and to spend?”*

* Ludwig von Mises, “Small and Big Business,” Economic Freedom and Interventionism (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1990), p. 221.



By adhering to this false “maxim” antitrust regulators are attempting to supersede the informed judgment of millions of consumers with the opinions Janet Reno and her former antitrust sidekick Joel Klein. Just how damaging this has been to consumers is revealed by several plain facts. First, in a poll of adult computer users taken by USA Today, only 6 percent said that “reducing Microsoft’s influence” was a “major issue” to them. Most consumers love Microsoft’s products.

Second, as Stan Leibowitz and Steve Margolis have shown in their book, Winners, Losers and Microsoft, in virtually any market that Microsoft has entered (financial software, spreadsheets, etc.), the effect has been a dramatic reduction in prices and an expansion of output and innovation. Software products that do not compete with Microsoft’s products fell in price by 12 percent from 1988 to 1995, but by 60 percent where there was competition from Microsoft.

Third, the government is clearly unconcerned about consumer welfare in its prosecution of Microsoft: In Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s November 1999 “Statement of Fact” he devoted a mere five out of 412 paragraphs to the issue of consumer welfare.

Mr. Litan, like his former employer Janet Reno, simply ignores that Microsoft has provided incredible benefits to consumers. He rests his case on the lame notion that, in his opinion, the company’s management had “anticompetitive motives.” Economic analysis may not be Mr. Litan’s strong point, but mind-reading apparently is. He claims that such a malevolent “intent” has harmed Microsoft’s competitor Netscape by keeping it from competing in the Web browser market. In fact, Netscape has distributed more than 150 million copies of its browser since 1995.

It is typical of government, and its intellectual apologists like Mr. Litan, to assume that business practices they are incapable of understanding—such as exclusive-dealing contracts—should be outlawed in the name of “fairness” or because of presumed bad motives.

Intel Doing Well?

As alleged “proof” that antitrust regulation is not harmful, Mr. Litan notes that Intel, which recently settled an antitrust complaint, seems to be doing well. This kind of statement ignores the important but unseen effects of such regulation. What is the opportunity cost of having to spend millions of dollars in legal fees and diverting management talent away from striving to produce better and cheaper products to deal with the blizzard of paperwork typically imposed on a company that is the victim of an antitrust “complaint”? Mr. Litan ignores such important questions even though it is well known to antitrust scholars that one effect of antitrust is to induce companies to be less successful than they could be out of fear of attracting the attention of antitrust regulators. It was the official policy of General Motors for many years to never let its market share top 45 percent for this very reason.

It has been standard knowledge in the field of industrial organization for at least 35 years (more than 100 years to Austrian economists) that the mere number of firms in an industry does not necessarily have anything to do with how competitive that industry is. Industrial concentration is usually caused by the fact that one or a few firms in an industry are simply more efficient and/or have a superior product than their rivals do—at least temporarily. Mr. Litan ignores this mainstream thinking by issuing a 1950s-era call for splitting Microsoft into three companies. The free market, guided by the preferences of consumers, has given us the current configuration of the computer industry; Mr. Litan’s proposed tinkering can only be destructive to consumer welfare and an affront to the principle of private property.

He also ignores decades of research by Chicago school scholars such as the late Yale Brozen and Harold Demsetz, and Austrian school scholars such as Dominick Armentano, who have compiled thousands of pages of published, documented evidence of how antitrust regulation has been harmful to consumers and has impaired economic efficiency and reduced productivity. “Our economy has profited greatly from sound antitrust enforcement,” Litan declares, without offering a shred of evidence.

Perhaps the biggest absurdity of all is Mr. Litan’s dire warning that “If you have monopoly power in our economy, don’t abuse it.” I’ll take him seriously on this point whenever he starts criticizing the government’s own monopoly power, such as the government school monopoly, the old-age insurance monopoly, the occupational licensure monopoly, the postal express statutes, cable television franchising, and myriad other monopolistic enterprises operated by federal, state, and local governments.

—Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Loyola College in Maryland

[Funkaloyd]

Oh thank you EU for making it even more difficult to use my operating system because now I have to download WMP

The WMP included version will still be available. But forcing MS to give consumers a choice is stupid. Might as well force all Chinese takeaway outlets to start selling burgers.

would a market where Linux, Microsoft and Mac all had 33% of the marketplace be better? [...] Where it requires 3 times the knowledge to function in society?

That would rule. The net's redneck presence would be gone in no time. FreeRepublic.com would be a ghost town.

[EN[i]GMA]

The WMP included version will still be available. But forcing MS to give consumers a choice is stupid. Might as well force all Chinese takeaway outlets to start selling burgers.



That would rule. The net's redneck presence would be gone in no time. FreeRepublic.com would be a ghost town.

Do you use Linux?

[Funkaloyd]

No, not that I couldn't.

[EN[i]GMA]

No, not that I couldn't.

So this is like the blind leading the deaf then.

[Funkaloyd]

Computers ARE NOT MEANT TO BE FRIENDLY. They're meant to be complex and intimidating. If you can't figure it out, you fail. You're off the team.

http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=porn

[ASsman]

Hahaha, Enigma I just won't bother. I couldn't possibly quote as many books as you to support my argument. I just have my reasoning.


If you can't seperate the chicken from the egg, I just won't bother. I'm sure you would enjoy continuing this, I wouldn't. Sorry for starting it.

But really, thank God I didn't bring up Windows and spyware. Shit, you might have me believing it benefits me.

[EN[i]GMA]

http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=porn

I love Maddox.

And yeah, I can use Linux, can you? Can most people? They wouldn't know an RPM from a tarball.

[EN[i]GMA]

Hahaha, Enigma I just won't bother. I couldn't possibly quote as many books as you to support my argument. I just have my reasoning.


If you can't seperate the chicken from the egg, I just won't bother. I'm sure you would enjoy continuing this, I wouldn't. Sorry for starting it.

But really, thank God I didn't bring up Windows and spyware. Shit, you might have me believing it benefits me.

Good, don't bother. It'll save us all some time.

And I'm sure your reasoning is flawless as you're obviously the smartest person to ever exist and as such, have the most flawless logic.

I very much would enjoy continuing this. I find it enjoyable.

My Windows PC has 0 spyware due to me using Firefox, Adaware, Spybot and not being a dumbass.

[ASsman]

And I'm sure your reasoning is flawless as you're obviously the smartest person to ever exist and as such, have the most flawless logic.
Irony.

[EN[i]GMA]

Irony.

Noted.

[Schmeltz]

Jesus, is seven posts in a row really necessary? High school really must have slowed down since I finished it.