Windows 7 Eyed For Antitrust Violations 290
Preedit writes "The committee that oversees Microsoft's compliance with the 2002 antitrust settlement now has its hands on Windows 7. The Technical Committee is checking to see if the software meets the settlement's terms. Among other things, it's looking at whether Windows 7 favors Microsoft apps over third party programs, according to InformationWeek. The story also notes that Vista SP1 includes a number of changes that were added to satisfy the committee. For instance, it eliminates several browser overrides where Vista ignored users' default preferences and automatically launched Explorer. Windows 7 is due sometime around 2010."
I Think Windows Lacks Features (Score:5, Funny)
I look forward to the 1,500 new options that will be available in group policies. I think I will understand most of these before Windows 8 is delivered.
Meanwhile, what do I do with this Glass Turd?
Re:I Think Windows Lacks Features (Score:5, Funny)
Polish it, of course.
Cheers
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Bah! Polish, not Polish!!
Cheers
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I know it's a tall order - like ID-ing the ugliest warthog.
The name "Glass Turd" is, of course, a loving reference to Windows Vista. Polished to gleaming, transparent perfection! "It's so pretty, I feel bad about hating it..."
The runner-up could get a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, installed on the computer of his choice. The Wi
Who cares (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazing how people blatantly ignore this.
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
False. Governments have the right and the duty to protect the relatively free market from abusive monopolies.
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
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Governments have the right and the duty to protect the relatively free market from abusive monopolies.
That's exactly right. If we want freedom in the market, we need rules and oversight to make sure freedom remains, and companies and cartels don't dominate. Of course that means the end of Freeman's "free-lunch for the already dominant players market" which is what he seems to have meant by that term. Humans are such symbol shifters, and it's great to see the meaning of that particular symbol shift.
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then why is it that you need to go out of your way to get anything else than a windows pre-loaded machine? why is it that 95% of the software that is made only works in windows leaving any other OS to use WINE + the performance penalty? why is it that IE makes up over 70% of the browser market even though 1) it is the least standards compliant 2) only after IE7 did it finally have tabs/popup blocker both having bee
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Rrrright. Until the moment that I can run MS Office on an other operating system we're stuck with Windows.
Personally I think it's a good thing that MS is not allowed to force you (1) to use Explorer if you buy Windows. or Mediaplayer or Outlook or
(1) or "encourage" you to use it because they can use special undocumented features in the OS than make their applications faster.
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MS Office has been available for Mac OS X for many, many years...
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And how about.... Photoshop?
Still, I know not enough about the mac to change to it, and it's not like you're buying a mac to try it.
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Let's use a example. I'm selling water in containers on the street corner. Some one wants to buy a bottle from me but I say No, if you want to buy my water you have to also buy a set of water glasses from me and this bag o ready mix cement too. You walk away laughing.
Now lets say I'm selling water but lets say the no one else has water for sale. I'm a mono[oly water seller. Now I bet you would buy that set of glasses and the cement.
The above is very clear cu
I've done code reviews before for gov't contracts (Score:2)
2 weeks later...
Approved!
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WTF? Where do you shop?
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
If Microsoft had solid competition, there would be no problem. The issue as it stands is that Microsoft has a monopoly on the Operating System business. Because of that monopoly, Microsoft can crush nearly any competitor they want in other areas by ensuring that their own software works better than the competitor's software. Examples of this include:
- Windows Media Player provides a superior Windows experience than RealPlayer
- IE provided a superior browsing experience on Windows over Netscape Navigator
In both cases, Microsoft effectively wiped out those company's markets by giving the software away for free. Which meant that Real and Netscape could no longer charge for their software.
Now one can argue that Microsoft produced superior products to both company's offerings. And there would be truth to that statement. The problem is that Microsoft ensured that there will never again be competitors in either space. Microsoft effectively wiped both markets out of existence and forced consumers to accept higher costs for Windows to subsidize those markets. Even worse, there is then zero incentive for Microsoft to innovate in either market. So consumers pay higher prices when no new development is happening in those areas.
While some balance is returning to those markets thanks to Apple and Open Source, the damage done has been extremely negative for the industry, with the WMV pseudo-standard and the IE pseudo-standard locking out competing OSes for nearly a decade. From an economist's point of view, the OS, multimedia, and web-browser markets would be a lot farther along today if Microsoft had never managed a stranglehold on these markets.
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Funny)
You make it sound like that was actually hard to do....
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Funny)
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Mircosoft does a lot of bad things, but giving away software is not one of them. Their competitors (various open source projects) give away much high
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, so you think that all software that Microsoft is not charging you for is free?, it is not! Every customer that buys Windows is paying for all applications that follow with. By locking their customers in with their built-in software which is mostly in the way they are missuisng their monopoly.
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
The first part is that it isn't that Microsoft gives it away for free that is the problem, its that they bundle it, make it the default, and even integrate it with the OS.
If Microsoft limited their free giveaways to software that had to be downloaded from their website and installed manually, their competitors would have a lot less to bitch about.
And the second part is that the rules CHANGE when you have a monopoly. What are perfectly acceptable business practices in a competitive market are abusive and illegal in a monopoly. In a competitive market if you don't like what a company is doing you just stop buying from them... in a monopoly you can't, so market forces cease to be effective.
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Re:Who cares (Score:4, Insightful)
apt-get install firefox
There is even a gui for it if you prefer.
Granted windows doesn't have this. But there's absolutely no reason it couldn't.
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I mean, they'd probably win a court case over that, but the risk of losing plus the cost of winning stands as a (surmo
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Insightful)
But what's wrong with pre-installing a bunch of browsers, or letting vendors decide?
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On IE7, the restart page doesn't work. Let me rephrase this: they did not bother to check if the most prominent error message in the entire OS worked right with the new brow
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You do realize this is really the -only- application that has this problem.
And my proposed solution would not be 'download links', but rather to create an apt-get type of tool for windows, and install that by default. Then on first run users can select whatever 'free' software they want from the repositories, including browsers, email clients, etc.
but then Windows would have to use something besides IE for its internet do
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? I only wrote 3 short paragraphs. You couldn't make it all the way through? Heres part of paragraph number 3:
"... the rules CHANGE when you have a monopoly. What are perfectly acceptable business practices in a competitive market are abusive and illegal in a monopoly...."
The difference between Mac OS and Windows is that Windows has been found to be a monopoly; and Microsoft has been convicted of abusing that monopoly. Mac OS isn't, and Apple hasn't.
See the difference?
Hint: Its not about -what- they do. Its about how what they do affects the market. Apple, by not having a monopoly, has more freedom to use different business practices because its unable to utterly distort and abuse the market. Microsoft, by contrast, has less freedom to use those same business practices because when they do use them it does utterly distort and abuse the market.
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What is different is market share and monopoly positioning.
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Most FOSSies aren't pissed about giving stuff away for free, even from Microsoft. What they are pissed off about is when Microsoft virtually forces
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Just imagine the problems and outcry if Microsoft created a fully featured product and bundled their own and third party fully featured products.
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And you blame Microsoft? Real decided to become nasty at one point (I think v. 10), running all the time, and being impossible to remove. WMP always was better.
Any time any MS product succeeds, do you assume it must be because of anticompetitive practices. Office is better than OpenOffice for many corporate uses, due to the annoying features that 80% of consumers don't use.
The problem is not when their software works better on
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So in effect, Microsoft caused the suckiness you are complaining about.
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It amazes me how many people get their history wrong on this stuff. WMP started competing with Real long before version 10. Real's seemingly nasty business practices were a response to Windows Media Player. Because WMP was so ubiquitous, Real had to take more drastic measures to make money. So they started branching out into new services and used their media player as a method of advertisement.
Bullshit. Real Player was an obnoxious piece of crap from its first release. The only reason it managed to get
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Now that's not to say that RealPlayer didn't have other probbuffering...lems, but it was othbuffering...erwise free from buffering... its modern annoybuffering...ware.
In any case, I will repeat what I said earlier. The REAL PROBLEM was that Microsoft killed the market before there could be any competitio
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Microsoft can crush nearly any competitor they want in other areas by ensuring that their own software works better than the competitor's software.
Except, ironically, it never does.
The problem isn't that it works better; it is that it's rammed down the customer's throat, often by dirty technological and marketing (FUD) tricks, resulting in a catastrophically worse overall outcome.
MS must be shut down to save civilisation. Believe it now, or later.
OT: Re:Who cares (Score:2)
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Personally, I'm not going to shed any tears. The GP was a moron who can't be bothered to even figure out when Microsoft integrated their browser and when KDE 1.0 was introduced.
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Informative)
Congratulations, you've been suckered by Microsoft's intentionally confusing naming scheme. To give you an idea of the grave error you have just committed, a good comparison would be to point at FileMan from Windows 3.1 and say that Microsoft has had a web browser FOREVER. Just as Windows Explorer != Internet Explorer, Media Player [wikipedia.org] != Windows Media Player. In fact, WMP was predated by ActiveMovie [wikipedia.org], Microsoft's first real attempt at streaming video playback.
What is it with Slashdotters and bad history today? Is this "make up history as we go" day and someone forgot to tell me? Or is it national unencyclopedia month?
Netscape gave away their browser to non-profit entities like students. Corporations had to pay to use the browser as late as 1998. In fact, I happen to have the press release [netscape.com] right here that made Navigator a free product:
And if you had actually read my post, you'd know that it doesn't actually matter. But I will add this: Netscape, Real, Eudora, WinSock, etc. were all pioneers of the Internet age. No one had given them roadmaps to follow, so they pretty much had to make it up as they went along. (And keep in mind that these companies were born in the fires of Unix, not Windows.) Microsoft was able to swoop in and provide a better experience by way of bundling their product. They were able to learn from all the mistakes of their predecessors, then use their market power to CRUSH them.
Even worse? Microsoft didn't write Internet Explorer. They obtained the source code to a competitor of Netscape's called "Spyglass". Their deal with Spyglass was that Spyglass would get a tiny sum up front in exchange for long-term royalties. Of course, Microsoft gave Internet Explorer away, so they refused to pay Spyglass any royalties. How's that for anti-competitive behavior?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Supporting Apple is the exact same as supporting Microsoft. They both employ lock ins and monopoly abuse. The only difference is one is convicted and hated unilaterally (rightly so, of course), and the other is seen as "well, it's not Microsoft, so it's okay".
Those with knowledge of Apple's lock in never bothered to buy an Ipod to begin with. By the time the "unreplaceable" battery came around, or the "unreplaceable iphone battery" came a
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Re:Who cares (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm.. My ipod I sync with Amarok (on ubuntu). Sure I can't download podcasts and stuff from the itunes store, but it will play any supported media on my player (mp3's).
My Fiancee has a laptop running windows 2000. Her brand new ipod nano requires version 7.4 of itunes, which won't run on windows 2000. She is doing fine using Winamp!.
Your logic is completely backwards. If i want DRM'd content from the apple store, I must use itunes, and an ipod. If I don't want to access that content, I don't! Just like if I want DRM'd content from Microsoft for a zune.
If I want to purchase MP3's legally online, I go to amazon.com, purchase the
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The worst thing is that iTunes is incredibly glitchy for me, right down to if i change window to it, half the time the entire interface is black and i have to switch out and switch back again.
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Which might put Apple in an interesting anti-trust position when Amazon (or similar) write a 3rd party app (with the new SDK) for the iPhone which links directly to their Amazon sales portal. Will Apple block this app? Is that an anti-trust issue? Does this SDK mean the iPhone is now a 'platform' much like the PC, or a 'device' allowing Apple to rule it in to
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That's really the conflict here. The things that Microsoft does, in and of themselves, aren't heinous at the face of it, and lots of other software companies do similar things. It's only when you consider the entire snowball effect that the implications become clear.
They'll do nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
Lost causes (Score:4, Interesting)
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And, a surprising amount of the time after an update My Firefox and Thunderbird clients have to tell me that they're no longer the default applications and do I want to re-enable them.
For some reason, I find that rather annoying. It was my setting yesterday, just because you patched a vulnerability on Outlook, why
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At home I have a FreeBSD box, and a Windows XP box -- the latter was
Virtual machine (Score:2)
Those can run your windows applications (Tax software) and even have modes where the Windows' windows are drawn as normal windows on the X-Window screen (instead of being only on the virtual screen inside the virtual machine) and thus mostly look-like native application (visually similar to what you get by running them with Wine, although the backend is completely different).
Also, a lot of these appli
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Well, both of my current PCs are about 3-5 years old, I can't remember exactly. At the time, the costs for a machine which could do that would have been prohibitive and that software wasn't freely available.
My buying philosophy is to buy near end-of-life machines (because I'm never going to tax the CPU) and put a large amount of RAM and HD in them, and then just hook them up to a KVM. I buy a sub $4
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Can I get a Same-Linux-Starting-Point high five!
Did you color-code the labels on the floppies for the different sets (Base, X11, Apps) like I did?
Man, installing Slackware back then really did make you realize just how unreliable floppy disks are.
-mattew
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Re:Lost causes (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it doesn't.
MS Visual Studio requires MS Office for some of the data aware components to work at all.
You mean the components that are designed to get data from MS Office? The horror!
Windows Media player often "reactivates" all on its lonesome
Funny, it's never done that for me.
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Re:Lost causes (Score:5, Informative)
If I'm wrong about the VS "data aware" controls, tell me exactly to which controls you're refering.
Finally, I've had plenty of media players other than WMP that I had set as default, and I never had XP or so far Vista randomly "reset" them. So you're either making it up, or maybe there's something else going on, like group policy making the change.
Re:Lost causes (Score:4, Informative)
I run several XP systems, all with Firefox set as the default - none have ever had their default setting removed, and they are all kept up to date with patches.
Installing Office does add extra functionality to Visual Studio (or at least certain versions) - it adds the Office data components, which are not shipped with Visual Studio. Or you could just download the Office SDK which includes them.
Outlook uses the Word HTML engine to display messages, but it comes with it included - you can install Outlook standalone with no issues (and you can even buy it standalone).
I can't see one thing the GP has said which I couldn't classify as FUD from experience with the products involved.
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Now we can come to some fair talk. Your first dismal of my comment wasn't at all inviting. I fully admit that I shouldn't have used the word "require". But I will tell you that Outlook specially asked (I didn't offer) to use MS Word. If I remember correctly, it apparently couldn't (or wouldn't) display a particular email. But no it doesn't require Word, I assume it would have found some way to display the email in question without word.
I stand by what I said about the Visual Studio components. They had no
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That same setting in Outlook may affect viewing emails. Also, if you're talking about outlook 2007, it has a built in previewer for attached files. If someone attaches a word document, you can preview the document itself b
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Re:Lost causes (Score:4, Interesting)
I wrote most of that code. There's no mechanism by which it could reactivate. Hit me up at zachdms at hotmail dotty com and I'll walk through whatever you think you're seeing.
Most third party players have tended to be a little lackadaisical when it comes to file association implementations. This is one of the big reasons why the new (easy) Vista file association interfaces (Set Default Programs) are so great. Ask your favorite application to support it if they don't already. I've supplied the basics to a number of third party vendors (WinAMP, VLC, MPC-via-CCCP) to get them up and running on this.
Due date (Score:5, Funny)
Proceed with modding down; it was worth it!
VISTA is Windows V.6x??? (Score:3, Funny)
Ubuntu (Score:2)
I know.... (Score:5, Funny)
It'll be the Year of the Linux Desktop (tm).
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Why is Apple Any Better, By These Standards? (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't Apple very heavily lean towards Apple software?
(This isn't starting flaming, this is a legitimate question - what separates Apple from Microsoft in these regards?)
Apple is the, " Underdog" (Score:2)
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Re:Why is Apple Any Better, By These Standards? (Score:4, Informative)
In some cases, it seems that Apple has made it too easy for third party apps to become the default. Stuffit in particular is almost viral in the way it claims all compressed files as it's own. I'd prefer the OS to ask me for confirmation before letting Stuffit rape my prefs just because I want to use a piece of legacy software in a
Perhaps one of the benefits of Apple's approach is that the underlying frameworks are far more separated from the front-end applications. Services like Quicktime and Webkit are usable by all apps, with relatively few undocumented APIs. Those frameworks are also more extendable, which makes for better interoperability. (eg. there are free Quicktime components that add oog support to all applications that use QT, even iTunes.) Webkit is open-source, so if you fix a rendering bug or download a nightly with a new feature, all applications can take advantage of that (even the proprietary apps).
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If(when?) things reach the point where Apple hardware comprises a significant portion of the overall installed base, you will see people claiming that any OS upgrades that they sell separately from hardware need to be subjected to antitrust re
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Forcing IE (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup, just try clicking on a link in a Messenger conversation with or without Vista. You get IE, like it or not.
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FYI: In any .NET application, you click an URL, IE is used. This is regardless if you have FF (or what have you) set as the default browser.
Bollocks. Counterexample: I've just tried opening a URL from the About box in Paint.NET (the only obviously .NET program I have that I can think of at the moment), and it opened in my default browser (Opera, FYI).
.NET, so I'm going to assume with little justification that it's a general feature of the programming framework rather than the particular program"?
Did you actually mean "One particular application I have does this, and it happens to be
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Likely this is just because a lazy programmer hardcoded it to run IE, rather than going through the proper API to figure out the user's browser preference and launch that.
Not a very nice thing to do? Sure. Intentionally malicious? Probably not.
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You'd be right if the software didn't get delivered that way.
For that to happen it means it has to get written that way by a lazy programmer. Then it has to (presumably) pass QA like that.
So not only is it getting written, but it's getting QA'd. Sure there's still w
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Slow News Day? (Score:2)
Can't wait for "Birdwatcher caught watching birds!"
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If computers were sold without an OS,
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I sort of agree with you, except that t seems to me that most places you buy computers sell them with Microsoft software pre-installed. (Unless they're selling Macs, obv.) So a) the average computer user thinks that Windows is the best option (otherwise why would computer manufacturers always ship with it), b) the average computer user gets used to using Windows, and c) the average computer user pays extra for their system because they think they need Windows with it.
Thanks for refining my point here... I h
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Ch-rist, but why is this such a hard concept? Or is this just Redmond's shills attacking