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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