Ouch! €500,000,000 + €2,000,000 a day!!!

Thats one expensive bittersweet pill to swallow...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6998272.stm

:)

I don't understand why the media player thing is a problem...

If I bought a car I'd expect it to have a stereo. If I want a better stereo or one that has a specific feature I'll buy another stereo if the price is right... I don't understand how shipping an OS with a media player is anti-competition.

If the rest of the media player writers aren't up to the task of making one worth buying then surely that's their problem not Microsoft's?

Ah, you just hit the nail on the head. Its a great example, but you are only thinking from a consumers point of view.

Imagine, for example VW were 85-90% of the car market (like MS is in the OS market)

You buy a VW with a stereo (may even be 'badged' as VW). The stereo is probably made by other firms who make stereos. VW has bought that stereo from the company that make them (mabe different companies for different car models) , who ever offers the best/cheapest/most suitable model.
Thats (to some extent) normal competitive behaviour.

However if VW started making their own stereos and selling it to themselves for virtually cost price, all those firms that made the stereos before would be in trouble. Almost no one would buy a new stereo when the VW one does most things 99% of people want it to do.
This is anti competitive and this is the problem.

What they should do is offer a choice of which media players are on offer. Ex. "MP3 is an audio file, you will now connect to choose an appropriate player for your media" Fine, they can put Mplayer at the top of the list, but at least they have given the 'little man' a chance. After all, MP3 isnt even a naitive microsoft format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-trust
Basically we should all be happy, as it helps protect us 'small fish' developers and *helps* stop corporations becoming too powerful.

You already do that with file associations. The little man has to create something superior to MPlayer. I actually bought WinAmp before it was freeware because it was better and more feature packed than MPlayer at the time. I'm prepared to give anyone a chance if they create a decent product.

This is about politics were you don't know what's going on behind. It was started by eu comission representatives of whoms you don't know whoms interests they are representing but with companies like IBM, SUN, Adobe on the other side it's quite obvious.

Microsoft did a lot of bad things, bought and destroyed companies but for sure the mediaplayer wasn't any issue. Other companies like Apple are doing this for years too with the software they ship with OSX like DVD Player, Quicktime, iTunes, ...

They wanted to nail Microsoft and they decided to try it with the Mediaplayer. I'm very glad that the Mediaplayer is included in the system as due to this you could rely on somekind of a minimal standard for your projects.

I think that such decisions come from people who either have no idea what they are talking about or they are simply lobbyists for the interests of the other side. But for sure they do not represent my interests, neither as a consumer nor as a developer. I do expect an modern OS coming with tools and functionality which allow me to make actually use of the hardware i have inside. Otherwise you could also rip off the shell or the image viewer and so on. Drawing a border here is completely arbitrary.

In the end you'll have to pay for it. May it be that you get a crippled OS (and as sales figures have shown, no one wants these crippled versions too) which costs your money on the user side because you have to pay for several extra applications or on the developer side because it takes you more time to develop a certain project because you can't rely on something like a defined standard.

The eu comission members or the court for sure won't pay for this...

Typical money grabbing EU BS. I don't think its a fair ruling, do they even have lawyers, judges and jury that understand the software and technology industries well enough to be able to make a proper decision?

The way I see it, the court only has the EU's financial interests at heart and took a gamble on something they felt they had a good chance of steering in their favour.

This is all about politics, the sooner the EU gets a kick in the pants the better. Right now it's an undemocratic socialist mess. It's run by a bunch of money and power grabbing few that make policy decisions behind closed doors without public intervention. All they seem to be good at is juggling huge unmanaged and undisclosed budgets that they can't be held accountable for.

No surprise what happened here with MS, shame there isn't really much anyone can do about it. Perhaps thats why MS brought out so many vista flavours that can be upgraded online.

That way they can sell a bare bones base model of windows in the US for peanuts that people can upgrade through online purchases. Kind of like how shareware works.

I have no problem with Windows shipping with media player... the problem is when these things are built in and cannot be uninstalled. Example: Trying to uninstall WMP11, because it broke DVD playback using VLC when installed. There were 3 methods of removing it on the MS website, none of which worked. It should just install like any other program and be easy to remove, IMO.

I think it's morally better ripping off Microsoft than bombing a land for oil in the name of humanity. ;O)

Someone always has to throw a quip in... Show some class... It is crap like this that gets threads deleted...

I think Microsoft should make a Vista EU version. Remove all of the bundled software (IE, WMP, etc). Make those apps available for free from their website. Then, charge MORE for the EU version. They have to pay for the bandwidth they are using to make those apps available for download. It costs them nothing to include it on the CD, it costs lots of money to have people downloading it.

Thin skinned today?

Well, if you want to support Linux and OSX in the EU then this would be the right decision. By the way don't we have to pay more for the software already?!

No, tired of people derailing good threads by making it break down into a disagreeable debate that is pointless and ends up with the termination of the thread.

Just like that other thread that has broken down into Guns vs. Martial Arts...

Just stay on topic, it isn't hard...

This is the whole reason there is a rule about discussing anything but computers and technology in this forum. They have gotten lax on this rule recently, but if you keep starting pointless arguments, they will start cracking down on it again.

Just relax...

>I don't understand why the media player thing is a
>problem...

It's really very simple. A monopoly in one market(Operating systems, Office suites), is not allowed to use the profits from that market, to offer a free product(IE,WMP) in another market, thereby driving everybody else in the market for mediaplayers out of business.

Most companies are mainly operating in one or a few markets. If a monopoly from another market enters a market using profits from another market to develop a product and then offers it for free, the market where the free product is released, will crash. All of these other companies will die, and only the monopoly will remain in the market. Microsoft has always gone one step further, by integrating their free products into their primary products(Windows into DOS, IE into Windows, WMP into Windows etc.), thereby creating an instant monopoly for their free products.

Who says that it's free?

It's part of the os. A os is responsible for enabling the usage of a computer. Writing a text in the texteditor, watching images, listening to sound, watching video content, browsing the internet as well. Today these are all rudimentary tasks.

The EU is a faceless, unelected and greedy piece of crap!

The quicker they stop meddling in world affairs, the better IMO!

Dabz

The problem is that microsoft doesn't *want* to give users the choice. Yes, they can make it 'easy' for them to end up with the default Ms players, but Microsoft really wants *everyone* to use their format.
After all, if everyone has media player, everyone can use WMA, if everyone ends up using WMA they can extend that into a portable mediaplayer market too, locking out other players there.

While the whole mediaplayer bundling seems petty and vindictive to fight, there really is a lot more to it...

And like it or not, the rules *are* different if you have a monopoly. You can't do everything that the other players in the market can -- it's illegal to leverage a monopoly to attempt to take over another market, for one.

Microsoft wants to sell their OS in Europe, which means they have to follow European rules to be allowed to do so.

If i want another video or sound player i just install another one. Where is the problem? Doesn't sound this hard to me. Providing the possibility to look at media content is part of a modern os. You don't wanna tell me that it's normal that i'm allowed to use a hw accelerated 3d windows manager but that i'm not allowed to listen to some music or watch some videos.

I use WMP and VideoLAN. I wish that between these two players I could play everything out there, unfortunately I still have to resort to real alternative and quicktime for .mov on occasion. Both those formats have native players that are complete junk.

I find it amusing that these are also the two helping the EU fight MS. The VLC player I prefer for many types of media is completely free and I don't see them complaining to the EU.

I do think that people should be able to uninstall WMP if they wish, but would hate to see it go away as it is my media player of choice for streaming online (outside of the usualy flash stuff).

>If i want another video or sound player i just install
>another one. Where is the problem?

That's not the problem.

>Doesn't sound this hard to me.

Because you don't see the big picture. Monopolies are a threat to society because they amass power and money and are very dificult to get rid of. Once a monopoly has driven out all serious competition in a market, they will leverage that monopoly accordingly, as Microsoft does with it's closed standards, hampering interoperability.

>Providing the possibility to look at media content is part
>of a modern os.

You only feel that way because MS integrated WMP into windows and now you are used to it.

Yeah, I would not wanna be Microsoft right now...

LOL

Maybe the Windows OS just ought to be a desktop with a start button.

Then we have to purchase every little thing that goes with it.

I can see it now. Buy/Install Windows Generic. Want to read a text file, you need to buy notepad. What? No web browser. Go to store, buy netscape. Install netscape, buy/download/install notepad, $5. Want to read email, buy/download/install email program $15. Want to watch a video, buy/download/install real player $20. Oh, it doesn't support all formats, buy/download/install another video player $15. It would just go on and on.

It would just be a nightmare. Companies that are giving away software right now would start selling their products in a heartbeat if they didn't have to compete with Microsoft's free stuff. It would be a lot worse on the consumer.

It will be interesting to see how this effects their share price.


Not in the classic sense, a OS should provide a intermediate platform for applications to talk to the hardware, bios etc. All the other stuff is 'bundled applications' Media player IS NOT part of the OS as it does not talk directly to the hardware, it talks through the OS.

Eg:

HW & BIOS <--> Drivers <--> Operating Sys. & essential system tools <==> [Applications*] <==> user

*Media player, Internet Explorer etc sit here.

(its a bit more complicated than that as some things can talk direct to other things but thats about the crux of it)

Blimey, that sounds not far off of what the EU has become in recent years :) Bulding a monopoly on goverment.

No. They are not "doing the same", because they do not have a defacto monopoly. Did you not read the wikipedia article about anti-trust that D4NM4N linked?

Which you aren't legally allowed to use.

Yes. But this is not a matter of technology. It is a matter of illicit business practices. It has nothing to do with software, it's a matter of Microsoft breaking the law. If Bush hadn't won the 2004 election, Ashcroft wouldn't have been able to pardon Microsoft, and they would've been facing the same issue in the US.

So which is it? Socialist or Darwinist? Surely only one of the mutually exclusive statements you just made can be true. Or don't you understand what socialist means?

A Windows with no other Microsoft products on it? I'd buy it. Microsoft wouldn't sell it of course, because they a bunch of unethical thugs, but I'd definitely buy it. I'd gladly pay twice, maybe even three times for an OS that doesn't grind to a halt, because I decided to watch a movie in WMP.

Yeah. Few of which can be done by Windows "out-of-the-box".

Which side of the argument are you on anyway? It's okay for Microsoft to force everyone to have WMP installed, because they're a monopoly, but it's wrong for Apple and Real (Adobe?) to force everyone to use their players? So you'd rather use illegal software? Wow. That's an interesting perspective.

That's because you're not looking close enough. The VLC project has faced plenty of legal threats from Microsoft.

I don't even know how to respond to that comment. Do you know of any country (with the possible exceptions of those engaged in civil war) that has a Darwinist government? No of course not. All governments have a monopoly on being the government.

the problem is the 95% of the rest of the users who wouldn't even know there WAS an alternative, giving microsoft essentially a *huge* boost in market share for media players -- giving them an unfair advantage thanks to their OS monopoly.

It's illegal to leverage a monopoly in one market to establish one in another one.

The rules *are* different for convicted monopolists.

Can't be bothered to respond since I'm not really interested in lengthy dialogue, just wanted to make some quick comments.

Tell me a part of the economy were this is not happening. It's a farce which should keep the impression that they have somekind of control. What for the society reasonable changes will come out of this? I don't see the point, no matter if it's the big one or not, that these functions aren't part of an os. We've left DOS days some years ago already. Tell me were you draw the border and how you define which parts are belonging to and os nowadays. Depending on whom you ask people will come up with very different opinions. Now you do have some people out of the politics who have no idea to define what an os is? Nah...


Not really, every computer/os i've bought after the amiga came without these functions out of the box. And if the amiga would have been fast enough in a standard configuration then they would have shipped such players as well.

Opening documentation about windows for other developers, reducing the price of the too much expensive Vista, these are things which make sense but removing the Mediaplayer or a Browser really is nothing more than a joke.

Cars, oil companies, mobile phones, mobile phone services, ISPs, computer hardware, food, dairy products. The list is endless.

I find it tremendously ironic that people would even come to Microsofts defense on this matter, since Microsoft wouldn't even exist if IBM hadn't faced similar charges in 1969.

You don't think the government should interfere with businesses? They already do! It's called "incorporation" and without it monopolies (or even large companies) would be impossible.

Correct me if I'm wrong, which I'm sure I am... However, I thought part of Apples marketing campaign was saying how when you buy a mac you get everything with it out of the box (unlike a PC), media players, video editors etc. If that's the case why aren't apple getting the same treatment?

@FlameDuck
I quite don't understand what your endless list is standing for exactly but i guess there is some reason behind.

As hinted before i think politics should interfer with business but in a reasonable way, not about a mediaplayer. This might be good for some "look, we care about" marketing for the EU but nothing which gives you something good in practice. There are quite a lot of issues which are far more important beeing solved and changing the way global business is working that this simply looks like the joke of the week to me.

They would if they held a monopoly, which they dont, this (as i posted above) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-trust is a good description of what qualifies a monopoly. Although Apple too could be in trouble over itunes.
Basically, if you give your competitors no room to breathe and are strangling them then its illegal in many countries, Including the US for those who had a rant about the EU being behind it. MS have been in trouble with the US courts before too, many many times but over there their exremely well paid army of lawyers can work 'miracles' :P

Basic History:
The only reason MS is successful today is not about being innovative, good with customer care or quality (definitely not!), its about money and dependance. They wrote (well.. bought it off a student) a once good bit of kit called DOS which became the international standard for all buisiness machines. With clever licensing they made so much money from MSDOS they could easily afford to push out windows v2 & later v3 (not sure what happened to v1 :/) to compete with the rise of apple. Because of the dependence on PC hardware, most people adopted the logical choice, windows. Once again they made huge money with Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2k, XP each time relying on dependance... people had PC hardware and IBM compatible programs, so the natural transition was windows each time, especially as MS has an endless supply of cash to market and distribute. All the while constantly trying to 'standardize' everything - not a bad idea, but unfortunately MS's idea of a standard is their way or the highway, which is to hang on to our old enemy.. dependancy.

Thankfully now vista has cut off so much legacy (as in it works on nothing but the newest and shiniest and has many compatability & user restriction issues), mabe there is a small glimmer of hope that the world will start to switch to something better and break this horrible cycle of dependancy that has lead the world to accept such an OS family that could have been much better if people refused to accept such sub-standardism.

Actually is starting to get the same treatment in different european countries.

For deliverying a media player with the OS.
For bundling iTunes and QuickTime together, which is illegal as well.

And now as they started to raise their marketshare, they will hopefully soon be set to same rules as they have been enforced on microsoft for a few years.
On the otherside, Microsoft does not need to care. All the shares that aren't owned by Jobs or apple themself are owned by microsoft. without MS Apple would have died years ago but they survived because they got a few hundred million dollars by microsoft back then.

So much to the bad bad monopolist

To me thats the same as someone saying, "i just strangled you to death and destroyed livelyhood, but dont worry, I will resurrect you and be your new DADDY!, just stay out of my way, give me a nice big cut of what you make and together we (*cough*-I) can rule... THE WORLD! BWAHahaha..."

lol :)

Why aren't there any other OS's competing with windows?

I know of Linux Distro's, Unix and Mac OS etc but how come after all these years no other company or developer has stepped up with a new PC OS.

How come after nearly 15 years of a windows being available I can't go to say PC World and pick either, Windows, Super OS 1, Fab OS, Linux, Mac OS, Genesis OS, Mini PC OS etc etc.. ? Fake names I know but it's just an example.

Why is there no variety like with other software?

Is it because no software company could seriously compete with M$ or because M$ have total control over the PC OS Market?

Would you want to be the dev responsible for writing a version of your software for all those OS's?!

I really wonder how people think that not adding a Mediaplayer will change the situation for the slightest. In the worst case they force the vendors to castrate their products in a nonsense way which will result into destroying a reliable platform, no matter if we're talking about OSX or Windows and beside of that you'll have to pay more for this and that on top then, you'll end up with a mess like Linux.

Good point, although I do like the sound of "Fab OS"!

Thats what the whole argument is fundamentally about. MSs idea of standardization is a members only club. Think of how many OSes can run perfectly happily on PC hardware. Programming for multiple osses and platforms CAN be easy with the correct standards (BMAX, gtk, python, java (non MS), openGL etc. are all testament to this that it can be done if greed wasnt a factor)

What hinders a universal development is closed standards (like directX for example) All video cards support it and need it to use them at full capacity, but which is the only OS that can use it properly?

Its a vicious circle.

To me having WMP and IE come together with Windows is not a real problem. However, being unable to uninstall them is.

There's no way to prevent IE from ever opening, even after I've selected Firefox as my default browser some programs still open web pages in IE. The same is unfortunately true for WMP. Although I can set all video files to open in MPC and all audio files in WinAmp, I can't seem to make WMP uninstall...

Its stupid TBH, its us that made Microsoft the company they are today. If we hated the software so much why did we buy it?

If it's easy or not developing crossplatform apps also depends on what you're trying to do. Certain fields can become quite ugly. Let's assume different os are available now for the pc platform a-os, b-os, c-os, ...

If they all do work more or less the same then i might question their existance as somehow no one needs derivates and they only making things more complicate as it's always more work supporting more than one platform no matter how slight the changes are. If they are different so that it actually makes sense then you'll be in trouble due to that everyone else also needs to have the ressources for writing proper drivers/apps, testing supporting all these different platforms.

It's so easy just saying "Oh, i take some free libs which are available for those dozens of platforms and then you know everything works, as these libs are available there". This is very naive and has nothing in common with the reality. Even if you're dealing with platform independent stuff like physics engines you'll have to take care of a number of issues.

The market also wouldn't enlarge and it just would mean a fixed number of users split over a larger number of platforms. I don't see why this would be nicer and easier. But i suspect games related console sales would skyrocket.

By the way without DirectX you still would be in the stoneage gfx wise and they would discuss and discuss and discuss what should be in the next version of OpenGL.

Most users had no choice or knew any different as its practically force fed to them by vendors

Q:Why do we continue to use petrol in our cars, when there have been cleaner cheaper alternatives for more than 10 years?
A: Dependancy on a standard (Everyones engine is petrol/diesel).

Q:Why are they still making petrol cars?
A: The oil giants are way too powerful.

Why we move on petrol/diesel? uh... because of each gallon 95% goes to the government?

Cant be that, because they could just as easily tax the alternatives.

like which?

Biomass, synthetic ethanol, bio-diesel, solid hydrogen cells etc.. (Not to mention several short range electric solutions that could be taxed in other ways)

Depends what you mean by the stoneage, if you mean America's Army, Call of Duty, Doom 3, Half-Life, Neverwinter Nights, Quake series, Unreal series and World of Warcraft (all of these use both renderers and look fine in ogl) Oh. and playstation 3 if i am correct?
It may not look as good (although i cant really tell the difference on my DX9 hardware) but thats not the point, the point is its a dominating members-only standard.


Anyway, DX10 vs OGL3 and alternative fuels are another argument altogether. It was just an example to explain my point which is, i drive a petrol car simply because I have no choice for my price range, so for me there is no realistic alternative due to oil market domination. Likewise I have until 3 years ago always used windows as there was no useable, realistic or better alternative for PC hardware, but now linux is more desktop ready there is, so i switched.

There have. The more well known competitors include IBM's OS/2 Warp, Novell's NetWare and SUN Microsystems' Solaris.

First of all, it wouldn't make sense to have a single developer write one version of the software for each platform. It would be more sensible to get different developers to port the necessary portions of said software to the target platform. Second of all the choice of platform and language have huge implications for how easy it is to write cross-platform software.

Well I don't know what you've used in the past, but I used to be able to compile the exact same source code in CodeWarrior, to work on a) Windows/DirectX b) Solaris/OpenGL and c) N64 Reality.

That's an interesting observation, considering that in the real world the push "from the stoneage" as regards to 3D graphics was pioneered by the OpenGL based GLIDE API from 3Dfx.

In fact it wasn't until DirectX 6.0 that Microsoft finally managed to catch up to the hardware capabilities of graphics cards at the time. If it hadn't been for competition from GLIDE and OpenGL (which was Microsofts initial choice until they bought out RenderMorphics) we would still be in the stoneage. Do you understand why competition is important yet? It's not because "Microsoft makes the best media player, LOL!!!1" - it's because without competition, there is no incentive for them to improve it.

Even if you really are one of the weird sorts who enjoy using Microsoft products, you should be glad about this. Why? Because when Microsofts monopoly is challenged, it results in cheaper and better products for you! Like IE7.

I have one problem discussing with you FlameDuck. It's a) time and b) fun as these discussions mostly end up beeing horribly long because you tend to bring up aspects which either are wrong, have nothing to do with the subject or were there is no right and wrong you have an opinion which i just don't have, so as i lack of a) today i would say i cut it from my side. I could disagree and argue to this and that again but this is leading nowhere...

>I have one problem discussing with you FlameDuck. It's a)
>time and b) fun as these discussions mostly end up beeing
>horribly long

You are being staunchly entrenched in your position based on lack of understanding, so you have a problem discussing with FD because he is being stauncly entrenched in his position based on facts.

>because you tend to bring up aspects which
>either are wrong, have nothing to do with the subject

Thats where you fail. If you don't understand the relevance, then do some research.

>were there is no right and wrong you have an opinion which
>i just don't have

Antitrust is not about opinion, but historical fact. You know what they say, Opinion is the last resort of the fool.

>so as i lack of a) today i would say i cut it from my
>side. I could disagree and argue to this and that again
>but this is leading nowhere...

Of course, the entire basis for your opinion is flawed. There is a reason Antitrust legislation exists, and M$'s behaviour has been well documented. It's not that FD is unreasonable, but that anyone with some interest in the subject should be able to frustrate you to that same degree, if they could be bothered.

Nope, it's in no way hard to argue against what FlameDuck has written (as well as D4NM4N in this case) but if i would do that you would get another posting with weird arguments which strife but not fit properly as most of the time. Killerloop until someone looses interest...this time it's me who looses interest. But obviously it's your right interpreting this as you please...

I didn't think any argument on this page was weird at all, for or against people all had some valid points. If its not hard to argue against what i said (esp. in on-topic posts 2 & 4) then prove me wrong.
You asked me to respond by posing questions so i did. That is what a forum discussion is all about after all.

DX is way ahead of GL in compatibility and features, especially when you don't have to rely on extensions from specific hardware manufacturers.

Even in 3D apps D3D is now the primary API since shaders in GL are very hit and miss. That plus there are very few artist friendly shader tools for GL.

The one plus GL had in the past was that it was a simple language that was easy for a basic/intermediate coder to pick up. Whether that still holds true today I don't know.

From an artists standpoint I havent seen any advantages. In 3DS max DX9 has all the advantages and runs faster than GL on modern hardware.

That statement is so absurd, I don't even know how to respond to it. Since when did Microsoft start writing hardware drivers? No? Then how are you not dependent on hardware manufacturers extensions? Or don't you understand how DirectX works?

"Modern" hardware maybe. But cutting edge hardware? Doesn't even HAVE DirectX drivers, because it's so far ahead of the curve, reverse engineering it to work with DirectX, would be too much of a hassle.

Secondly "runs faster" is an arbitrary metric, since there's no way to measure it empirically.

Just load the same scene and run it in GL or D3D in 3dsmax silly :) You can use both you know :).

Direct3D is bound to run faster than OGL under windows as it is after all specifically taylor made for it. It has nothing to do with the physical hardware capability of the graphics card. As i said above, the PS3 uses openGL (custom or not) and that looks pretty good to me :/

Its curious that on my dual-boot machine, OGL on linux seems much better and smoother than OGL on windows. So, how do we know that there is not something in windows designed to slightly retard the way OGL runs? We don't, probably not but there could be, we would never know. (After all MS has been trying to kill off Open GL for years in underhand ways, even threatening in the past to no longer make windows even compatible with it, which they learned would neither be a popular or clever option)

This isnt about media player... at all. Its about the principle behind it. Media player was one of a long long list of potent reasons to take MS to task. If you read my second post (3rd from the top) you will see why.

To be honest i find it fairly amazing on a forum of indie programmers that people would be actually trying to defend this kind of behaviour. Imagine you had written a widget to do something that was really useful and then the following year a MS bastardization of it was nailed into the side of windows and thrust in front of practically every PC owner on the planet. Would your buisiness survive? I think not. Or how about a more extreme case, how would you all feel if MS suddenly turned around and said "Right.. Unless you are one of our very 'established' friends, no one can program themselves anymore. We will now write or approve all software you can run on OUR operating system" (which interestingly under the vista license - *if you read it very carefully*, they have left provision for should they so decide. - Although this would be a very difficult and stupid thing to do, as they would be straight back in the dock. However if they were only 20% of the market then this wouldn't be a legal or moral problem, just suicide.)

While i disagree with the EU on almost everything, i think they did the right thing here 100%

I agree with FlameDuck & D4NM4N.

Well like Winston Churchill said, you get the government you deserve. Labour and the EU. I'm just glad I left before the place fell appart.

id agree with that ;)

Not sure how its relevant though :/

And this happens everyday in business. Someone makes something then it gets copied. It is the way things work. And it is the reason patents exist. So, the person who invents/develops something can profit from it for a while before other people are allowed to.

True but if it gets to the extent of a stranglehold then its illegal in almost every (westernised) country on the planet, the only exception being state run monopolies, which only tend to privatize when either a system is knackered or overstretched (like the UK rail network) so they can blame someone else when it falls apart :/

It wouldnt be a problem if MS offered it as a free download from their site (like messanger), its the fact that its bundled thats the problem as it doesnt allow for anyone else to even get a chance other than if someone goes out looking for it. I am a IT engineer and i can tell you right now, that about 80-90% of your average basic home & office user (the vast majority) only know and use media player simply because 'it came with it'. Which would also be fine (and legal) if the market was more evenly divided.

Also, MS have cleverly stomped on many patents in the past and got away with it simply by using their wallet.

A question to people in the U.S.A. Is it better in the U.S with lots of phone companies? Or would it have better to still have just Bell?

Did splitting Bell up help?

No idea about the phone thing. I wasn't a phone user back then. :)

Dunno about the US but privatisation of the once state owned gas, power & BT monopolies was definitely better for UK customers as prices dropped (due to competition) and there was more choice depending on how you used your phone. Im guessing the same thing happened at some point here in sweden too. Now I can call anywhere in the (western?) world for +-10p connection and 1p a minute after that. However, when there is only one company, they can charge what they like because there is no competition. (and also because users have no comparison so just accept it).

The rail service in uk was a disaster, but i suspect the govt sold them a load of crap in the first place and did not disclose it properly. I think its getting a lot better now than it was in the early to mid 90s tho.

Not all government run monopolies are bad though, some things should never be privatized like i said above (civil services like the police, army etc)