Ongoing Microsoft Legal battle in Europe

DHFrame

Right, I don't get it.

From BBC.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7834792.stm

Latest http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8096701.stm

In its statement on Friday the European Commission said: "Microsoft's tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice.

In February 2008, the EU fined Microsoft 899m euros for defying sanctions imposed on it for anti-competitive behavior.

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I just don't get it. Windows is made by Microsoft. IE is made by Microsoft. Surely it's up to them to provide an Internet browser in 'their' operating system. Why aren't Apple being sued? They make OSX and included is an Internet browser called Safari. Same thing. I cant see what the problem is?

How can it reduce consumer choice as mentioned above? Do I not have a choice to download Mozilla or Safari? I think this is a bull**** way of getting **** Loads of Money out of a massive corporation and this is all they had on Microsoft to do it. The corrupt legal system is allowing it to happen.

I would like to know other people's thoughts on this.

Dan

Capt'n Midnight

The point was that you had NO choice. You could not uninstall IE. And unlike all the icons for ISP's like AOL that came with win 95-98 you wern't offered choices.


When it comes to anti-competition laws Microsoft seem to be complete chancers and have a very long history of taking the píss, many billion dollar court cases dragged on for years because even if they loose the other companies have withered and died due to lack of sales. This case with IE is just this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft yet again.

In the USA you can have a monopoly as long as you don't abuse it.
IBM were forced to buy in an operating system for their PC,
Microsoft owe their position to the anti-monopoly laws.


In EU you can't have a monopoply, example we used to have the 3rd cheapest cheapest electricity in EU, considering our size, rural population and lack of interconnector that's some feat. Since then prices were raised to encourage "competition" and no foreign company has been interested. Should they have to play by our rules if they sell here ?



Yes they should be allowed to give any apps away free as long as you can uninstall them and replace with a similar app.


Other blarent anti-competition stuff from the ancient past which doesn't endear them to anyone.
"DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run"
Setting up a price structure where manufacturers paid a royalty per computer regardless of which OS it had ( if you bought another OS microsoft still got paid ! )
Using undocumented API calls in windows to make their products faster/more stable.

DHFrame

Capt'n Midnight, Thanks for the reply. I love this kind of stuff! Is there any Countries that Microsoft can still get away with this kind of stuff? It would be nice to start seeing new startups creating new operating systems. How is it that there are only 2 operating systems in the world? (Well big commercial ones anyway). And what would happen in the unlikely event that Apple and Microsoft were no longer around. Sorry if they are silly questions my imagination sometimes gets the better of me.

Capt'n Midnight

there are more than two commercial operating systems , the bigger ones aren't as common on desktops

Overheal

but can you uninstall safari on a mac

Speaking of monopolies and Anti-Trust, Intel is in the crapper for paying incentives to PC manufacturers to supply fewer AMD builds.

And what about Linux? Or other OS's? Why dont Manufacturers use something other than Windows?

Blazer

How apple are not being constantly fined is beyond me..
Tying ipod to itunes...OSX to their machines etc etc..
At least with MS you get a choce...so you don't like IE..big fcukin deal..just don't use it and use Firefox instead..
All these fines are a complete con by the EU..I'd love to know where the money is gone to..
If we applied the ruling against other companies..let's say Ford...you have to order the car a certain config...you can't put in any radio you like...you can only choose this range of alloys etc....
it's just a complete sham...MS should just tell the EU to fcuk off..what are they really going to do about it? Ban windows from being sold in the EU...that's a laugh,..last thing they want is a trade war with the US.

Overheal

Next it will be about which grower Guinness sources for their Hops.

kaimera

how does one download a new browser on win7E with no browser to begin with?

yoyo

I can't see how "innocent" Apple get away with sneaking in their Safari browser with their Itunes update, fine, people need I Tunes for their ipod to transfer music to, doesn't mean they would love a bonus of Safari auto downloading the next time they allow Itunes updater to run without checking, Imo Apple are worse than Microsoft in that sense, The only decent browsers out there currently are Firefox and Opera anyways imo..

Nick

Capt'n Midnight

kaimera wrote: »

how does one download a new browser on win7E with no browser to begin with?

ftp from the command line :pac:

Overheal

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

ftp from the command line :pac:

That works? how?

Capt'n Midnight

do an mget from releases.mozilla.org/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/win32/en-GB

BoB_BoT

humm maybe the manufactures are allowed to modify their versions to include browsers. If you're shipped a disk with no means to simply go online (customers who have no idea what ftp is), you're going to confuse a lot of these people. They could end up putting in a feature that says "click here for internet" then gives a list of browsers to download. IE being first on the list of course, slightly larger font, twinkles every few seconds

Blazer

All the OEMS will be shipped with IE installed.
It's only the retail versions for consumers that won't have IE.