I heard on NPR that the EU courts were requiring them to change the name, because it’s too long to be competitive, or some such nonsense.
Apple most certainly does have a monopoly when it comes to OS’s.
At about the time Netscape tanked…? Yes, IE was the better browser. Style sheets, remember?
I have Firefox installed, and even though it has a lot of features I like, I go on using crappy IE6, simply because webpages look better. It also annoys me, when I use FF, that if i click a link, way down on a page, and then click back, it goes to the top of the first page, not the position where I clicked the link.
People seem to be missing the point about the use of the monopoly to make IE nearly universal - that once that had happened, Microsoft stopped development on the browser. The abuse of the monopoly meant that the public had a far inferior product compared to what could have been developed, had the competition been around.
If you have read the stories about the American antitrust trial, Microsoft people admitted that Netscape was the better browser when the anticompetitive behavior began. Whether Netscape got worse because of the behavior, or because of mistakes, or a combination of the two, it is clear that IE got market share from reasons other than quality.
Dasgupta you should really read about this. Did you realize that PC makers had to buy copies of Windows for every machine whether or not it was installed? That Microsoft threatened Intel? That IBM got releases of Windows extremely late because they had the gall to still offer OS2?
The people who suffer are not those like us, but those who get viruses because they don’t know or are too scared to download Firefox, or who are in companies dumb enough to write internal websites depending on IEs non-standard features.
That sounds interesting, I’d love to read about it. If OEMs were forced to buy copies regardless of their use, then that sounds more monopolistic. I’d still argue that there’s no difference between that and Apple, since you cannot buy a Mac w/o OS X.
As for the non-standard websites, that’s just developer’s stupidity. Why you wouldn’t want the most people possible viewing your site is beyond me. Also, there’s no excuse for writing a browser with huge holes that allow viruses and spyware, but one can hope that the market will sort that out naturally and force tighter security, as seen with XP SP2’s firewall, popup blocker, MS Anti-spyware, etc…
Well, I didn’t use the phrase “virtual monopoly”, but I do see your point. However, I think the definition of monopoly you’re aiming at* is unattainable, and thus useless for practical purposes. To my mind, competition authorities ought to step in when a company is abusing its market position to give its products an edge, and is thus competing not with quality or superior salesmanship, but by forcing others out of the market with the sheer power afforded it by its size. Can a company do this without being a total monopoly in your sense? I think they can, and I believe that Microsoft’s actions are pretty unequivocal abuses.
You ask what the difference is between Apple’s bundling and Microsoft’s, and to my mind it is simply that Microsoft effectively controls access to approximately 97% of the consumer software market, while Apple controls barely 2%. Apple’s power in this sphere is so small that its capability to harm competition is virtually nil, while Microsoft’s power is such that it can effectively declare itself the market leader without really trying. This is ultimately detrimental to the consumer, whose interests the competition authorities are supposed to preserve. I agree that it’s worrisome that we’re now into grey areas - how does one define excessive power, or anti-competitive behaviour in this manner? However, I think we absolutely have to wade in to those grey areas. It’s not going to give us a satisfying, objectively complete definition of “monopoly” and so forth, but I think it’s pretty plain that a market can’t function properly without some sort of mechanism to preserve competition.
Well, I think your dates are a bit suspect - by the time Win2K was released, Netscape was already a dead duck, its market share all but eliminated by IE’s bundling with Win 95/98. While it’s certainly subjective as to whether IE was or wasn’t better than Netscape (my personal opinion is that it would be charitable to IE to say they were equal), my point is that it’s surely insupportable to say that IE was so much better that it would have obtained a 97% market share in a natural competitive environment.
- Which I presume to be complete and utter monopoly, where there are no other suppliers - correct me if I’m wrong here.
Semantically speaking, yes, but only if you restrict your perspective to the practically insignificant segment of the desktop computer market that Macintoshes represent (sorry Apple folk - this isn’t a comment on the quality of Macs). I don’t think, from the point of view of maintaining a competitive software market, that this is a useful way of looking at it.
And as a final note, I should point out that I’d much rather the authorities simply split MS into an OS and an applications business, as was originally mooted (in much the same way as Bell telecom was split into the Baby Bells). That would avoid the need for this artificial sort of sanction, and would be a much more satisfying solution all round. I still think it’ll have to happen at some point.
I personally never understood all this monopoly crap against MS. You want to use real? Go fucking download and stfu. What’s the problem?
I don’t mean to suggest you did. Most news sources do, and I believe the rulings (US and EU) do as well.
It’s fair to say that on computers running Windows, WMP has as unfair edge because it’s preinstalled. I’d call that uncompetitive, sure. I still don’t think it’s a monopoly, but it is unfair to competitors. (Just to reiterate, I don’t find it a monopoly since you needn’t use Windows, and if you do, you can uninstall WMP and install what you want. WMP is not needed for the OS to function.)
And that would probably be a good thing. But I don’t see Windows losing market share because of this. The telcos did because smaller telcos could offer the same features (ie: basic telephone service) for a lower rate. It’s not likely that a software firm can up and write a new OS that offers the same features as Windows. And if someone does, more power to them.
Okay, but disregarding whether we semantically define this to be a monopoly or not, and I can see why you differ on this - do you believe this anti-competitive behaviour is something that could, or should be remedied? Do you not think that the sheer difference in scale between MS’s market control and Apple’s is relevant in considering what constitutes anti-competitive behaviour?
Oh yeah - I agree that the instant effect would not be to reduce Windows’ share of the market; rather, it would be to stop MS apps from beginning life at the top of the heap, simply because of their distribution advantages (and privileged access to MS’s proprietary Windows APIs). But that’s enough for me. I like Windows (since Win2K, anyway), and choose to use it because I think it’s good. I can choose Linux if I want, and indeed I do (I run a dual boot system). But I find myself using Windows for pretty much everything but software development, because it’s slicker.
It’s not really that it’s significantly inconveniencing the end consumer, it’s that it avoids the need for Microsoft to compete for people to use its media player, since they have little choice but to get it. Real, MusicMatch, iTunes, etc. all suffer as a result, since they no longer simply have to offer a better or comparable product, they have to offer one so much better that people stop using what they’ve already got (even though they didn’t choose it). The end result is that most people end up using what they’re given by default, the competitors go bust because they’ve got no easy way to compete even if their product is superior, and MS sit on their laurels and stop work on their media player because there aren’t any competitors left. It’s pretty much precisely what happened with IE - there’s been no significant development on IE in several years, since there’s been no need. Just an endless series of security holes and bugs, which only get patched when the PR gets so bad that there’s no other choice.
Lack of competition isn’t bad because it’s inconvenient, but because it’s so seductively convenient, yet you end up with crap.
What was preventing Windows OS users from installing 3rd party media players? If there was something I didn’t like about WMP, I would find one that I did like, and it worked. Nothing popped up that said, ding “Whoa!! Wait just a minute! We don’t allow Winamp to run on our Windows platforms!”
Did the availability of better browsers prevent IE from gaining a near-100% market share? Has the availability of much better browsers made more than a slight dint in that dominance? Quite simple, market forces don’t exist in a monopoly (or near-monopoly).
Nowt, albeit that WMP is fairly heavily integrated into things like IE and Windows Explorer. But this isn’t the point. There wasn’t anything stopping anyone installing a third party browser either, but the simple fact that everyone already had IE prevented enough people from making the choice at all that Netscape was effectively killed.
It’s not like this is theoretical, or anything - this is plain fact. Netscape was outright killed by bundling. There simply isn’t any other reasonable interpretation of the facts, unless you believe that IE is so mindbogglingly superior to every other browser in existence that it gained and maintained a practically unheard-of market share simply by dint of its undeniable brilliance. Do you?
NOOOOO!!!
Quicktime is friggin´ sweet, we use it at the animation studio the whole time and its the best player by FAR. You couldn´t imagine the bag of tricks it packs; besides having the best tracking you´ll find (when you scrub the time slider back and forth) it has very good compression codecs that keep a very good image quality. Among the utilities it can resize, rescale and rotate a video on the fly, cut and paste videos togheter as easy as in a notepad, you can extract tracks (video or audio) use and extract alpha channels (for transparency effects) you can even paste a video on top of another one like on a picture-on-picture TV. All that and much more and fast as in right away, it´s a simply brilliant piece of software. Putting it besides RealPlayer is a sacrilege! 
Oh yes, WMP sucks big time…
I’m not an expert on anti-trust law, but I think some of Microsoft’s practices over the years have been unethical and abusive of their market position.[sup]*[/sup] In the current case, I’m curious how they can get away with offering the non-bundled version of Windows for the same price as the bundled version. In essence, doesn’t this mean that they are giving away Windows Media Player for free, and isn’t that sort of dumping prohibited by international trade agreements?
- Full disclosure; I work for a competitor of Microsoft.
And damn Ford, why can’t they sell me an Explorer without a Ford engine in it??? :mad:
Ah, such innocent naivete…
You miss the point. The developers did want the most people possible viewing their web sites. The problem is that most people use IE, which sometimes renders standard html incorrectly, and which often gives the best appearance when given non-standard code to render.
For example, this page discusses a number of IE bugs that prevent the browser from rendering cascading style sheets (CSS) correctly. With one of these problems—the IE float model—Microsoft apparently realized with IE5 that it had a problem , but then “fixed” the problem in such a way that IE6 still failed to comply with W3C standards.
I see where your coming from, I just don’t feel it’s very monopolistic. Go make an OS then and pack your own crap on it, go work with Linux people, etc etc,. Perhaps MS can make things that function better with their OS. Id unno, I don’t care enough to get worked up about it, I see the points made from both sides.
Mozilla and Firefox seem to be gaining share on explorer these days.
Of course not, I use FireFox.
But wouldn’t you know it, IE did come bundled with my copy of XP. And :eek:, would you believe that I found my way out? Could others not do this?
Absolutely, but it’s taken about 2 years of Firefox, Mozilla and Opera (my choice) being totally superior to IE for them to gain a combined market share that is still in single figures. In a world of fair competition, would the market share really indicate that IE is 93 times better than Opera?
Basically, people settle for what they’re given unless they have a huge incentive not to, which means that Microsoft’s ability to bundle IE turned it from a product which might (if we’re charitable) have gained parity with Netscape to one which captured the entire market for nigh on 6 years, stifling any sort of browser innovation in the process. Bundling turns mediocre products into world-beating ones, just by default. That in itself is enough reason to act to protect competition, IMO. Making it more convenient for the end user to switch is not the reason for acting, it’s the means by which competition is protected. It might seem like a trifling difference to us, and indeed it is, but it makes an enormous difference to the browser/media player market, as can be clearly observed in the browser example.