Microsofts Legal Battle


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hi team i hope some one has seen this on cnn.

hi team i just watched the tail end of cnn bizness and finance news.

microsoft are having a legal battle over their software i think this concerns WMP.

the bit i was interested in was the presenter said .

euro was trying to get microsoft to change the name of their next operating sys

and microsoft was near to agreeing.

because i missed the first part of the article does this mean the sys

longhorn.

ive tried to get that article again but i may have to wait until the next biuzness up date .

has any one else seen this .

perhaps the american members of the board .

have better access to this news than me.

marty

hi team ive found my answer.

sultan posted the news article in full to me .

marty

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For those who haven't heard:

This is part of a large-ish antitrust battle between the EU and MS. Short story is that the EU is forcing MS to ship a version of Windows XP sans Media Player. Microsoft, showing a bit of a sense of humor, initially planned to call the resulting system 'Windows XP Reduced Media Edition'. The EU rejected that name and after some back and forth both sides have agreed to call it 'Windows XP Home Edition N' and 'Windows XP Professional Edition N'.

It will be interesting to see how Longhorn is affected. One the one hand it's supposed to be more modular, so it might be easy to strip out WMP. On the other hand, it's possible that components of WMP will be firmly integrated into the Avalon presentation framework, which could make it difficult to pry out. Shades of Internet Explorer.

Edited by jcl
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Why is it that they had to ship it without WMP, its not like thats wha people have to use it?  I heard it was some monopoly thing or something - but I dont get how.

It's an antitrust case, it doesn't have to make sense.

What happened was that EU found that MS had abused its monopoly to damage competitors in the audio/video software market. It's apparently a principle of antitrust law that the punishment should be related to the crime, no matter how silly or ineffectual that punishment might be. Bonus points if it hurts consumers.

There's also a €500 million fine (a whole week of revenue for MS), an ongoing battle over opening some comm protocols for licensing, and some other stuff. It's a fairly significant case.

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