Toolkit

Story: Monti to Microsoft: Guilty as charged

Posted by: Mike Warr (Thursday 25 March 2004, 1:29 PM)

I personally think that this is ridiculous. The media player issue relies on seriously flawed logic. The net effect of a ruling by the competition commissioner is that the customer will pay more ! How ridiculous is that !

If the media player is removed from the core application, then the customer will have to buy one. EIther by buying the core product plus the MS media player application or the additional purchase of an alternate one. The compettition will have to sell their product in order to remain commercially viable. In order for MS competition to be competitive the media player must be heterogoneous and this represents development cost which must be recovered by the application developer

Therefore this will represent an additional unit cost to end user.

As an end user, personally, I just want to have a multimedia player and I dont care which one it is. If I can get it for free as part of the core application then that is one thing. It would grate on my nerves to have to pay for one and then install it into the operating system.

Further, although there are alternatives out on the market place I dont see that any of them are far superior to the one included in the core application.

Therefore, I personally can not see the value in the EU requirement to have 2 versions of windows os in relation to competiton because as a consumer I am going to pay more as a result of this decision.