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EU vs Microsoft & free real player 8

By Peter Neill found at axcessnews.com

As you may have guessed already, I have a problem with this situation, but its not the one you might expect.

I totally agree that Microsoft have something of a monopoly in the OS market, and that, in the case of Media Player, they were in effect leveraging that monopoly to gain an additional foothold.  However, i do not believe that Microsoft have been as successful at leveraging this monopoly as some companies would have you think.

One of the companies pushing for the EU to come down hard on MS, and in particular make them unbundle Media Player was Real Networks.  As you may be aware, this company produces Real Player, a Media Player that many people, including myself consider spyware & bloat-ware.

Obviously Real Networks, consider the dominance and bundling of Media Player to be the reason that they are lagging behind, and as such applauded the EU's 2004 ruling against Microsoft.

I however do not consider that is the reason they are lagging behind, I think its obvious they are lagging behind for the reason I stated earlier, the bad state of their product.

You only need to look at Apple iTunes to back this up.  Apple has shown that with a good product, the so called dominance of a bundled Media Player can be offset. Its true that Apple used a hardware and software combination to do this, but they still did it.

Another example of a fine product making inroads is Firefox, its market share is growing everyday, against the tide of a bundled Internet Explorer.

In the light of all I have said above, I consider the EU's antitrust ruling on MS a little over zealous. I agree that competition has to be fair, but I believe, in the interests of protecting the non tech savvy consumer, there are issues that need to be dealt with before going after Microsoft's bundling of products such as Media Player.  Namely protecting the consumer from the practices of some of Microsoft's rivals, in the way that they build their software and how it behaves.  
On top of that, while companies are still allowed to market what is essentially spyware, the EU’s ruling requiring exposure of Windows source code to third parties, can only add to the ability of less ethical companies to make their products even more invasive.

Once this third party software environment has been made a safer one and far stricter laws covering spyware and malware have been put in place, by all means open the floodgates to more effective competition, but in the mean time, allow the door to be half closed, as Joe Bloggs, the guy with the new $499 Dell, he needs some protection.

Note - Peter Neill is an IT manager and consultant living in Wicklow, Ireland. He can be reached at pneill[at]gmail.com

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