Computerworld reports that a committee of regulators has a copy of the next version of Microsoft Windows, aka Windows 7, schedule to ship in 2011 and are evaluating it to ensure that non-Microsoft components can replace certain features provided by Windows.
The settlement of Microsoft’s anti-trust case contained a ruling specifying that, when there are competing providers of a “middleware” feature, Microsoft must provide open interfaces for competitors to integrate their feature into any Microsoft operating system.
This is an example of regulators favoring an academic theory of “competition” over the consumer. Most computer users don’t want to assemble their own operating system out of components. While some power users and IT professionals enjoy reading reviews in PC magazines, trying new products, tweaking their system, and appreciate the subtle differences between one search product and another, the average user wants an operating system that “just works” out of the box with a useful combination of features. As with any product, the companies that create the operating systems must determine what features their customers would like and at what price.
A trend throughout the evolution of computer operating systems has been the absorption of more and more features into the core product itself. New computer software products often are invented by peripheral or niche firms, which then sparks a flourishing of competition, with the better products being absorbed by the operating system vendors and integrated into their products.
Other niches in the software industry are the result of outside firms attempting to compensate for deficiencies in Microsoft’s products. Most of the anti-malware and computer security software industry for PCs is an example of this. If Microsoft had done a better job at securing their operating system, this entire industry would be much smaller, or perhaps not exist at all.
In recent years, Microsoft has made some efforts to improve the security of their Windows product. To the extent that they are successful in doing this, it reduces the need for consumers to purchase additional anti-virus and similar software. To characterize this as some kind of an anti-competitive unfair advantage for Microsoft is ridiculous.
The committee mentioned in the article is tasked with ensuring that Microsoft does not exclude competitors who wish to offer features similar to those in the Windows product. By creating an increasingly integrated operating system — something that Apple Computer’s evangelists frequently criticize Windows for lacking — Microsoft is filling a need and reducing the necessity of scarce resources being used by other firms to fill this need. The opportunity cost of having, say, ten search vendors, is that these programmers are not available to create other software products, perhaps products that do not naturally fit within any operating system.
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Proponents off Linux point out how much is included. Many Linux distros include email clients, web browsers and office software. They include a choice of each of these. Excluding the media player from Windows created an unsellable product. BTW: MS is not a monopoly. It has a large and entrenched customer base. The Post Office is a monopoly.
Proponents off Linux point out how much is included. Many Linux distros include email clients, web browsers and office software. They include a choice of each of these. Excluding the media player from Windows created an unsellable product. BTW: MS is not a monopoly. It has a large and entrenched customer base. The Post Office is a monopoly.
At one point in time, you could not play a DVD on Windows out of the box. You had to search the web for a codec, purchase it, and install it. An example of great “competition”?
At one point in time, computers did not come standard with DVD players. You had to search computer stores for one that worked with your system, purchase it, and install it. An example of great “competition”?
Robert:
I think we already have a Java function for this!
public static boolean shouldRegulatorsDoSomething(Object something)
{
return false;
}
Remember that case of Microsoft being sued for an antitrust violation and attempting to “crush” Netscape? Netscape was trying to sell an Internet browser, and Microsoft included one in every operating system. In essence, Microsoft was sued for the crime of attempting to give away for free what others were trying to sell.
And speaking of crushing competition, that is what the free market is all about: attempting to eliminate competitors from the marketplace by offering consumers a better deal. If some big conglorporation puts a mom-and-pop out of business with wider selection, lower prices, and clever marketing, so be it. If a mom-and-pop takes business away from a major conglorporation with lower prices, higher quality, and better respect for the consumer’s wishes, so be it.
Regulation, noun. a euphemism for telling other people how to do their jobs.
useless spectator
Remember that case of Microsoft being sued for an antitrust violation and attempting to “crush” Netscape? Netscape was trying to sell an Internet browser, and Microsoft included one in every operating system. In essence, Microsoft was sued for the crime of attempting to give away for free what others were trying to sell.
If I remember correctly, Netscape were giving their product away for free!
I can read this blog not because I’m running Windows, but because the protocol (HTML) is independent of the operating system. If this site decided to distribute its content through the MS word format (.doc) its user base would decrease. In a sense, that is what software companies try to do from time to time: limit the options of their users. Another analogy would be a car that works only with a specific gasoline brand. The regulation (as pointed out by useless spectator) is not a smart move, and comes to fix another dumb move: the intellectual property of software components (in my examples, HTML, the .doc format and the secret gasoline).
BTW, netscape is the ancestor of the mozilla/firefox browser you are most likely using.
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And speaking of crushing competition, that is what the free market is all about: attempting to eliminate competitors from the marketplace by offering consumers a better deal.
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Er, no. That’s what monopoloy capitalism is all about. No competition no free market. Time to crack open the Econ 101 books again.
God bless the European Union.
In a competitive free market environment you compete against your opponents to either gain their user base or appeal to new users(or both), if that results in you company becoming a monopoly that is most likely caused by unworthy opponents than by anything else. Remember AOL? Where are they now?
Actually, that is exactly what competition is about: offering consumers a better deal than the guy across the street. In the process, the guy across the street may go out of business.
Economic competition, like any other competition, is about outperforming the opponents. If you successfully outperform the opponents, you win. They lose.
Agreed, and since Microsoft had a monopoly over the O/S there was no competition nor did they outperform anyone. That’s why they lost in antitrust court.
If Microsoft had no competition, why were its “competitors” constantly complaining about Microsoft “crushing” them? The antitrust case againt Microsoft was motivated by its competition, as every antitrust case in history. The resultant laws limit competition – or subsidize second rate competitors at the expense of the better competitor, and thus the consumer. Maybe econ 101 is the problem. Try cracking open a book written by Mises, or might I suggest DiLorenzo on this specific topic. The whole of the European Union might even gain from it.
If a ‘regulator-designed’ Windows doesn’t kill off Microsoft, nothing will! Then the regulators can complain that Linux doesn’t have enough competition, or maybe they’ll go after the Mac instead.
If they survive I guess there will still be some people that will be whining about anti-competitive practices by Microsoft, even if they are forced to release their entire code base.
Competing can mean offering an equal or better product at the same price or at a lower price.
Whether the other guy goes out of business should be irrelevant. Unfortunately, it is not irrelevant. The video recording format competitions are cases in point where they weren’t concentrating so much on making a better product as in obtaining “market share”, nearly regardless of profits or compensation to production workers.
Finally, free market competition excludes initiation of force and fraud. But M$ seems quite eager to engage in some initiated fraud if it will prompt government to use its force to drive down employee compensation.
MS has pulled a lot of dirty tricks over the years, including holding back information about the API’s Windows 95 used that helped the MS Office suite gain market share over Lotus and Word Perfect products – both of which were far superior to MS Office when running on the older Windows 3.1. Remember that the EU antitrust investigation got started not too long after that happened, so they were probably hypersensitive to the issue.
Its their product they are not required to release anything to their potential competitors, of course regulators think otherwise.
But why stop there then? Why are those same regulators forcing the Pharma industry to do the same? Or any other industry in which their Boss(uncle S.) has entrenched interests?
When I told a friend about Windows Vista Home Basic, which not only does not come with MS Media Player but that MS Media Player would not even run, she asked why Microsoft would ever produce such a completely useless product. The EU demanded that MS “unbundle”, and Microsoft unbundled ad absurdum, ensuring that people would have to buy software upgrades from Microsoft to do what they expect to do with their machine out of the box.
MS Windows has always had competition. Microsoft, by grabbing the high-ground of DOS-comes-with-the-machine in the 1980′s, was able to undermine other products by keeping efficient APIs secret, and publishing inefficient APIs so that no matter how good the competition was, their product would not work on the MS operating system as well as MS products could.
By using software copyrights and patents, Microsoft ensured that what is written to run on Windows will not run on anything else. What software house has the idle time and money to write their code twice?
Microsoft also created huge demand for Windows through marketing, while the negotiation of sole-source contracts with OEMs ensured that nearly every commodity computer shipped in the world came, at the high water mark, with Windows95. That momentum has carried Microsoft forward ever since. MS has also done everything to maintain that edge, even unto those nefarious practices that the EU, the “anti-trust” regulators, and anyone who has read the “Halloween Documents”, knows very well.
Even this article continues that Microsoft-benefiting perception of Windows ubiquity, by saying “software” but actually meaning “Microsoft Windows” and yet everyone still accepts the article as written and understands what the author really meant.
But Microsoft has always had competition. Apple is the most obvious, but Apple never made a commodity computer. Apple makes the software, makes the hardware, provides support. Where are the monopoly and anti-trust regulators?
The article also errs in ignoring the universe of F/OSS software. The assumption made that “features are moved into the OS” is not symptom of the F/OSS environment, where small tools that do one thing very well is the rule. There is also no lack of competition between projects which do the same job, be it kernel, database, “desktop” or office suite.
It’s been 8 years since I erased my last working copy of Windows. It is a testament to the power of the Microsoft Marketing Department that we are still having these discussions AT ALL!
If you still use Microsoft Windows, do yourself a favor: download a live Linux CD, and find out what real competition in software has been doing for the last 13 years of Microsoft marketing dominance.
You say MS have competitors and that there is no lack of competition. So that competition while not technically inferior(and I grant you that point) is otherwise incapable of good marketing strategy, hence MS market share cannot be blamed on anti competitive tactics but on incapable opponents, that instead of betting on innovation are trying to connect their products with the ones from their primary rival. Also if there are competitors how is Microsoft using its IP to do anything, they could always do something many times better than MS and hence beside the span of their IP.
Also beside the point why do you keep referring FOSS(which means GPL or compatible) and not BSDs, Apache and other non-copylefted software?
Many of them have been around since before most FOSS, have a good market share in their own specialized markets, and in the operating system area even have some technical benefits to some technical users when compared to the paladin of FOSS (linux).
Yet I know that FOSS proponents tend to see licenses(ISC, BSD, MIT) that give you power to do anything if you refer the original author as less free when compared to GPL that restricts the freedom of the user, and enforces community based sharing.
Hold on, all those “security” companies that depend upon MS Windows being insecure crap, isn’t that just the “Broken Windows” fallacy again?
Ha-ha-ha, “Broken Windows”!
Curt Howland: When I wrote “software” I did not mean Microsoft Windows…I meant, any operating system for the desktop user.
I believe that the average home computer user, wether they are running Windows, Apple, or Linux, want an integrated experience that works out of the box.
I take your point about F/OS. The migration of features into the OS is not a symptom of development as such.
However I do think that this is process necessary in order for home users to adopt an operating system or a Linux distro. While power users and Linux geeks may enjoy finding a media player, an IM client, a desktop manager, etc., installing them, configuring them, and getting them all to work together (recompiling the source if necessary), I believe that this is beyond the average user who doesn’t care about computers as such, but only wants to use a computer to do things for them.
The more successful Linux distros (such as Ubuntu and the EOS) come pre-loaded with an array of programs that perform the most common functions.
“may enjoy finding a media player, an IM client, a desktop manager, etc., installing them, configuring them, and getting them all to work together…”
If you still hold to this belief, then you have not tried any Linux distribution in the last 10 years.
Or, even more likely, you just believe the Microsoft Marketing Department hype.
Do yourself a great favor: Go to http://www.pclinuxos.org and get their live CD. Then discover for yourself that everything you have just said is untrue.
Oh, sure, in 1995 I had trouble with configuring the display for my monitor’s frequencies. But we’re not talking about 1995, are we?
Microsoft still enjoys only one single advantage: some few hardware OEMs still write their drivers to work with Windows, then don’t bother to write for any other kernel or provide specs so that F/OSS developers can quickly make drivers.
The Herculean efforts of F/OSS developers to reverse-engineer hardware in order to write drivers without the support of the manufacturers is well known. If monuments were built for true heros, there would be forests of them in accolade of these mighty coders.
Howland: re-reading my last comment, I can see how it came across as if I meant that Linux in general requires that level of effort. What I meant, though perhaps not stated clearly was, hypothetically, people don’t want to do that much work.
I would make the same comment about the broken versions of Windows that couldn’t play DVDs; that shippped without a decent firewall; that don’t have a decent search features; and so on. There are many deficiencies of Windows that require the user to either install add-ons, or just suffer through an insecure computing experience.
In my own life, I use Windows and Linux about equally and find that each has its strengths and its weaknesses, depending on what I am trying to do. But again, speaking hypothetically, I expect that most home users don’t want to have two computers running different operating systems and switch between them.
-Robert
Robert, Ah! Glad to know my impression was mistaken.
Indeed, most users don’t want to hassle with things to get them working. Sadly, the MS Marketing Department hype glosses over the efforts users must go through to make everything “just work” on Windows as well.
The bundling efforts by Microsoft took a lot of the sting out of things, but that same bundling was exploited by rent-seekers to call in the regulators. I personally don’t have any argument with Microsoft over their bundling efforts, other than what is to me obvious copying of ideas in a way that Microsoft would prosecute others for if done in the other direction.
(for instance, Windows disk defragmentation is, in my opinion, a direct lifting of the original Norton Utilities defrag look and feel, but implemented badly.)
Just one more, if I may.
I am _NOT_ looking forward to the day when F/OSS is illegal due to fear that availability of the code means terrorists can use it, or “Trusted Computing” where encoded binaries are the only way that the “Trusted” parts may be distributed.
That will be a very clear case of regulators writing software, and the results will be awful.
If ‘regulators’ wanted to give us a choice, they would regulate the damned government agencies so they didn’t require Microsoft documents!
The end result of all this regulation is that Microsoft will not be allowed to fail when everybody (at long last) discovers how atrociously bad Microsoft products are!
Compare Microsoft, Apple, and Canonical (Ubuntu Linux) on media players:
Windows includes an integrated media player, Windows Media Player, for music and videos. It comes with most of the codecs you could want. WMP has proprietary (i.e. secret) media formats. WMP also has a proprietary Digital Rights Management format. It has a proprietary protocol for interfacing with portable media players. (Which Microsoft has licensed to other companies.)
Mac OS X includes an integrated media player, iTunes, for music and it can do videos. It uses Apple’s Quicktime player for the actual playback. It comes with most of the codecs you could want. It does not primarily use a proprietary media format, instead using the standardized MPEG4 format family. It does have a proprietary DRM format. It also has a proprietary portable media player syncing protocol, which Apple has not licensed.
Ubuntu comes with a stand alone music player (Rhythmbox) and a stand alone video player (Totem). Both are based on the GStreamer multimedia framework. While not exactly integrated, they work fairly well. They are included on the CD, requiring no extra installation to run. It comes with only Free (libre) codecs. Installation of codecs for various MPEG, Windows Media, and other formats is considered extra. This is only for legal reasons, however. The installation is fairly straightforward. There is no DRM capabilities. It can work with both Windows Media and iTunes portable media players.
So, what does Windows Media Player have that the others don’t? Integration into the operating system? Nope, iTunes does that. DRM? iTunes does that too. Work with media players that other companies make? iTunes doesn’t do that.
iTunes is a much more the integrated, outsider-excluding system is than Windows Media Player. The GStreamer stuff is pretty open, being open-source and everything, but not widely supported. Ubuntu doesn’t included multimedia codecs for legal reasons (patents on multimedia compression algorithms). I thought that people didn’t like patents on this site, right?
If you want to avoid having to install multimedia codecs in Ubuntu, use the unofficial fork called Linux Mint that includes them then. (I digress, but the concept of a fork is something that you just don’t see in Intellectual Property. Forks are great. If you don’t quite like how a program (or other IP for that matter) is progressing, just copy the code and make your changes.)
If Microsoft and MPEG didn’t have there government-granted copyrights and patents, then Ubuntu would likely have the codecs installed by default. They don’t, so you have to install codecs yourself. Takes ten minutes, though, so I don’t see the big deal.
If the politicians attacking Microsoft weren’t hypocrites they’d have to attack Apple too. But, politicians will be politicians. It’s all irrelevant though because Microsoft is an enemy to liberty (sort of) because it relies on IP laws for its business.
(Another digression, but I think it’d be possible to have closed-source software even without IP laws. Microsoft would just have to very carefully guard there source code. Not that they don’t have to anyway.)
Ok, that’s all I wanted to say.
Josh
PS: I’d like to see the government try to destroy Linux.
Forks are great. If you don’t quite like how a program (or other IP for that matter) is progressing, just copy the code and make your changes.)
Oi! And just how many people do their own coding? Sure, the percentage of hackers on *Nix boxes is higher than on Windows or Macs, but then, that’s part of the problem with the mainstream adoption of the *Nixes. Most people have more important things to do with their lives and time to learn an arcane programming language and figure out how to create their own fork, just to get a program to do what they think it should have already been able to do.
And how many distributions and forks are out there compared to how many versions of Windows or the MacOS? It’s bewildering to the average user. Even one of my favorites, FreeBSD, has succumbed to the version upgrade/fork madness, but not yet to the extent that Linux has.
I may just have to learn C++ and programming for BeOS/Haiku-OS so that most other people don’t have to.
Don’t you realize that Mac OS X 10.x (not 9 and earlier) is a fork of NEXTSTEP, which is a fork of Mach and BSD, both forks of UNIX?
Why do people not consider Mac a *NIX? Is it because it doesn’t use X11 for it’s GUI?
Sure, Linux has “hundreds” of distros, but most are specialized systems or pet projects not designed for general-purpose usage. There are, in truth, only four real distros: Fedora/Red Hat, Slackware, SuSE (a mixture of the two previous), and Debian (plus it’s little brother Ubuntu). Oh, Gentoo and Arch are there too but those are for real geeks.
So, when you look at the choices of Linux distros it really isn’t that overwhelming. You’ve more choices in breakfast cereals at the grocery store. And it’s not like all of the distros are the same flavor, they each have a different design and suit different tastes. All you have to do is know the difference, maybe sample it a bit, and choose.
Most people have no problem choosing breakfast cereal. People seem to have a harder time choosing software for some reason. Maybe it’s because they see a “no choice” scenario (Microsoft Office does this) or they can’t be bothered to learn the differences.
Sometimes people pick software that plain doesn’t work for them and then they spend there life hating the computer. If the could easily try different software they may find something that suits them better.
Of course the price barrier on Apple computers kind of stops this, and the same for regular PCs. (The Microsoft “tax” isn’t that much.) I like Linux though because I can try anything I want. I want to listen to podcasts? Cool, I’ve a dozen podcatching programs to try. I try one, don’t like it, try another. It’s all free so I can pick just the program I want. No hassle, no strings attached. (Of course this isn’t exclusive to Linux, except in the operating system realm. Shareware and freeware for Windows and Mac serve this purpose quite well.)
Forks are good. They provide diversity and a bit of personal sovereignty in choosing and using software.
The function shouldRegulatorDoSomething should be declared as statist not static ^^
“Oi! And just how many people do their own coding?”
Oi! And just how many people fix their own cars! What’s the point of having a hood that can open for just anyone!
Ball, the TSA has a blog where people can post comments. They use WMV for their cute video about the Macbook Air. When challenged as to why they use a proprietary video format, they replied that since most everyone uses Windows anyway, they’re justified in their use of WMV.
And, as you point out, governments in the US use Microsoft proprietary formats for most everything (with the obvious exception of PDF).
“And how many distributions and forks are out there compared to how many versions of Windows or the MacOS?”
MacOS 6,7,8,9,10
Win95, 98, NT, NT4, 2K, XP, 2003, 7 versions of VISTA
Linux 2.2, 2.4, 2.6
Oh sure, you can pick roots or variations on Debian, RedHat, Slackware and Gentoo, but it’s really not all that hard. Just use what your friends use so you can ask them for help.
Those who are intimidated by the concept of freedom are the ones that haven’t tried it.
If, having tried it, you’re still confused, just ask someone who is free and deals with it. There are also enough pushy people who are free that you’ll always have the option of following someone else’s advice.
…But then, this same advice is good for most any choice you can make in life. The self-help section of the bookstores is ample evidence of that.
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