Intel and Skype Exclude AMD 492
Raenex writes "CNET is reporting that Intel and Skype have signed an exclusive deal that would cap the number of conference call members on all but Intel architecture. Skype will only offer 10-way conference calls on specific Intel chips while other chips, including all AMD chips, will only offer 5-way conference calls. From the article: 'Though few would argue that a niche feature like that is going to be a deal breaker for most PC buyers, the importance of the Skype-Intel alliance goes well beyond VoIP conferencing. Indeed, it's the latest, and certainly most prominent, example of Intel's new take on marketing: Lock in software partners as well as the PC makers.'"
Low Blow (Score:5, Insightful)
Gatta start watchin Intel's sucker punches.
Oh no... bloody murder! (Score:0, Insightful)
Devices (Score:5, Insightful)
Cisco has a good start on them though - but not the software, that's Skype.
This is going to be an interesting field to watch for the next five years.
Re:Low Blow (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya, well... uh... NO SOUP FOR YOU! (Score:3, Insightful)
The one positive thing about this..... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd make a choice--but not on the hardware... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I wouldn't avoid buying a PC with an AMD chip. I pretty much buy all AMD now, and I plan to continue. I would, however, be sure to not use software that tries to dictate to me what type of hardware I use. I wonder if this will backfire on Skype?
Stupid move (Score:5, Insightful)
It also turns into bad PR for Skype for the tech community to find out that Skype intentionally hobbles their software.
Re:Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. - NOT QUITE (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, there is one way. I had the exact same thought as you did, right up until I realized something: Intel no longer has a monopoly in the processor market.
The conclusion that then follows is: There is no more anti-trust. Just competition.
Scary.
We'll keep on saying it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Other industries do this (Score:1, Insightful)
For example, Itunes requires your portable mp3 player to be Apple Ipod.
I dont see the big deal. It's a similar concept, tie-in value selling.
I don't see calls for Apple to stop preventing people from making Fairplay compatible mp3 players. Or at least licensing out or opening Fairplay reasonably.
It's a stupid move for Skype (Score:4, Insightful)
If we are to have antitrust laws, now is the time (Score:5, Insightful)
This is on a par with Ford and Exxon agreeing that unless you are burning Exxon gas your Ford's engine will be capped at half it's rated horsepower.
Re:Low Blow (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:OS X (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'd make a choice--but not on the hardware... (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't wonder. I recently signed up for skype, just because my family was on it and it was free. But I think it may be time to think about alternatives. Thing about a free service, it is really easy to walk away when they do stupid things like this. I can't possibly see why skype thought crippling its software would be good for business. And it really makes me think Intel is on its way out if they can't compete anymore on the merits of their products, but have to conspire with other businesses to exclude competition.
It is a sad day for those two companies.
not so sure it'll backfire on Skype (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of people are commenting that this is harmful to skype, but I'm not so certain. After all, Joe Sixpack will only know that he can conference call with all of his buddies with a intel machine, while AMD "can't handle it". The whole concept of software limitation is totally incomprehensible for the majority of the non-slashdot crowd.
AMD better start a massive PR campaign RIGHT NOW to make this backfire on Intel and Skype.
Re:Solution.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Skype is a an end-luser-only solution. This makes it the solution of choice for the rest of the Internet end-luser population until a better alternative comes along.
As far as the "limit conferencing to 5" this is quite an interesting twist. Conferencing is clearly a business feature. Very few consumers are interested in it. At the same time the main complaint of AMD against Intel is about practices that deliberately lock out AMD from corporate markets (not the consumer ones). So by doing a restriction on a business related service Intel is not just shooting itself in the foot. It is doing it with a bazooka while looking at the exhaust funnel.
Skype is also shooting themselves in the foot. If they claim that this is for technical reasons (which sooner or later they will) AMD can take them to court and force them to enforce this limit on all AMD driven hypernodes. While the argument is clearly far fetched, there is still a fair chance that a good AMD lawyer may manage to get Skype smacked with a "limit to 5 for anything on AMD " injunction. Now this will be seriously entertaining. Most hypernodes are consumers and students. This is AMD land. Not Intel who is usually sitting behind the firewall. So, I like the smell of collapsed P2P networks in the morning. It smells like victory.
It will be also a good idea for AMD to buy a few congresscritters to force mandatory legal interception provisions on Skype.
I see great entertainment ahead. This is worth watching and following. Time to chose a front row seat.
Re:Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. (Score:2, Insightful)
RTFP (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Low Blow (Score:1, Insightful)
So, Intel does it and it's just good business practice, Microsoft does it and it's time to bring in the antitrust lawyers because it's unfair and anticompetitive.
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:5, Insightful)
You got it backwards. Intel is not leveraging a (no longer existing) monopoly in the processor market to help Skype gain a monopoly in the VOIP market. Rather, it's the other way round: they are leveraging Skype's near monopoly in VOIP to bolster Intel's dying processor monopoly.
So the real question should be: are there today any credible competitors to Skype?
Re:Low Blow (Score:5, Insightful)
Competition is making a better product or doing it for a cheaper price. Anti-competition is forcing people to use your product by artificially limiting another product that people want to only work with yours. This is just a bullying tactic. Now, Skype with 10-way conferencing isn't exactly a big stick, but it's still a stick we're being hit with. But the principle is even worse than some of Microsoft's monopolistic tactics. It's not just integration or bundling, it'd be more like only allowing Windows to play mp3 files above 128 kbps using Windows Media Player and artificially crippling others. (The fact that it's two companies here instead of two MS departments doesn't make much of a difference to the harm to the end user.)
I'm wondering if they factored in the anti-marketing this does for them. I'm less interested in using Intel and Skype products now.
Re:Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. (Score:1, Insightful)
Skype just took their first step toward being irrelevant in the market.
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody wants it.
At least, nobody wants it enough to pay a premium for it. Because a Linux pre-install is a *separate* product from the Windows pre-install, it doesn't get made for free. It actually costs the manufacturer to provide Linux pre-isntalls. If the demand for Linux pre-installs is high enough then the cost is worth it. But if not, it's a loss, and so the manufacturer stops providing that product line.
Linux users, as a whole, are perfectly capable of installing Linux on their own. Even if you did pre-install Linux, odds are the Linux user is going to slap on another distribution anyway. You might as well be marketing OS-less systems rather than Linux systems.
In short, the absence of Linux pre-installs on desktop machines from the large OEMs is not evidence of a dastardly conspiracy.
Re:Intel Outsiders (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course the "lockin" isn't that simple. Intel doesn't lock out other OS'es, like Linux, from Intel CPUs, nor does it lock Windows or any other OS into using only Intel. Even the Skype/Intel preference isn't simple - other CPUs will still work, but not as well, by contract. But HW/SW lockin is far from new, as the creaky old term "Wintel" itself indicates.
Of course, that's not the point of the Intel PR that CNet is reprinting without critical reflection ("reporting").
Re:Low Blow (Score:1, Insightful)
In the long run, it's a non-issue to the consumer, they have other options.
There is no law here, no one is going to be FORCED to buy an Intel.
Re:We'll keep on saying it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Put your money where your mouth is. You can't say "use this" if "this" doesn't exist.
Intel can no longer compete on a technology basis. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the sign of a company that is falling behind in their core markets.
Re:Low Blow (Score:5, Insightful)
In this situation, intel is offering incentives to a software manufacturer to cripple their product on a competitors hardware. I agree that a competing product could be released that didn't have this arbitrary restriction, but I think it is clearly anti-competitive behavior that it was released in the first place.
Re:Skype: Tomorrow's Napster. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, Skype isn't even on our radar. At least not with my company since we focus exclusively on VoIP for small businesses. And we love Vonage and the handful of other major players because they are leading the charge against regulation and fighting the legal battles with telcos. Plus their marketing saturation lends creditiblity to the concept of Internet telephony.
And to the GP, I wasn't claiming that Skype will fail for the same reason as Napster. I simply said that they will have the same historical significance. Also see: CP/M, Altair 8800, Lycos, and the thousands of other technological pioneers who were later runover by more nimble players in the market. They all failed for different reasons.
One more reason to use AMD (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Low Blow (Score:4, Insightful)
See, the only difference between competitive behavior and anticompetitive behavior is that anticompetitive behavior isn't innovation; it's simply trying to squash the competition.
Further, you have to ask, what does Skype get out of all this?
Another sink-the-company idea from Intel. (Score:5, Insightful)
An Intel marketing person thought this was a good idea. He is one of those who knows nothing about technical things; he's just a marketing drone. What could he possibly do to advance the strength of his company? Nothing. So, to pretend that he was contributing he turned to evil. He made a deal that looks good to other know-nothings like himself, and is really, really offensive to the people who matter.
This is a violation of the anti-trust laws, I think.
New Intel mottos:
Intel: When you can't compete, be adversarial.
Intel: We're on the way down.
Intel: A technical company controlled by people with no technical knowledge.
Intel's present adversarial behavior is part of a gradual decay of the company that is more than 10 years old, in my experience. Perhaps 10 years ago, Intel arranged a pay cut for employees just before they began to do record business. During that time, Intel has done some really, really disgusting things, like trash their consumer products division by not paying enough attention to it.
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:2, Insightful)
Because no one wants them. Some manufacturers have done this in the past, but it turned out that there weren't enough buyers to make it worthwhile. This is because a pre-install is a good in its own right, and sufficiently valuable that consumers are willing to pay for it.
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:3, Insightful)
But the market IS FREE to decide the point. Just because they aren't deciding it the way you want it decided is beside the point. Volume discounts are legal, ethical and moral, regardless of the size of the company. A restriction on volume discounts requires government intervention into the marketplace, which makes the market unfree. These interventions typically take the form of arbitrary anti-trust decisions.
You CAN have a free market with anti-trust in your legal framework. But you cannot have one when the anti-trust is arbitrary, as it is in the US legal system. The error in the US system is to treat competitive actions as anti-competitive.
Wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Are they crazy? (Score:3, Insightful)
"keep others out" deal anymore?
10 years and people still don't get it...
1) Bulk/Bundle licensing has been around for a long freaking time, pre-Windows even.
2) It is the OEM's decision to buy the bulk licensing to include Windows, NOT Microsoft. Blame Dell, or whoever is making the computer, not the OS Vendor.
I was the head of a very successful company in the late 90s that competed against the Dells, Gateways, etc. WE CHOSE NOT TO DO THE BULK BUNDLING DEAL WITH MICROSOFT. It cost as 3-5 dollars a copy more for OEM Windows (That is it), and Microsoft gave us all the benefits that Dell and any other company got. The only difference is we could choose to sell a BSD or Linux based computer, the trade off, we paid about $3 more for each OEM copy of Windows.
So when you talk about Microsoft keeping the 'market' from moving to Linux or BSD or anything else, you need to yell at Gateway and Dell and others for CONTINUING the myth that is a Microsoft thing, when it is their OWN thing and their OWN greed to save the $4 bucks instead of offer more choices for their users.
Everyone is mad at Microsoft for the Windows Bundling, but EVERY freaking company does it, and has offered it. Microsoft DOES NOT require ANY company to do it, nor do they get ANYTHING but a better price.
And yet companies like Google are signing the same deals with Dell, and other companies in the past have as well, so that you can't order a freaking Dell without the Google desktop, or think back over the past 10 years and all the CRAP software that was bundled with your computer as 'feature'.
Heck even Corel's Wordperfect tried to get my company to exclusive bundle their prducts by offering a better a price.
Why do you think you see so many Wordperfect bundles on systems (especially over the past 8 years), do you think it is because the computer makers are trying to get back at Microsoft? They could give a crap, plain and simple, Wordperfect is cheap, and exclusive bundles are even cheaper.
Yet everyone thinks Microsoft is the only one doing this, or is doing it in a way that no one else is doing it.
So go yell at Dell, HP, Gateway, NEC, Toshiba, etc. They are ones that have limited your OS choices, not Microsoft...
Re:Low Blow (Score:3, Insightful)
While you are not strictly wrong, you are out of context. You've defined competition in the most generic, generalized sense, not in the market sense, and don't accept that it can mean something else in another context. By your definition violations of anti-trust laws can still qualify as competition. But at least you'd have at least one major supporter [rechargermag.com] of your definition. (If you look, you'll even see that word "anti-competitive" used in the same context as here.)
Evil (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stupid move (Score:3, Insightful)
Because Skype was one of the early VoIP services, they have network effects [wikipedia.org] working in their favour (e.g. I "have to" use Skype because all my colleagues/friends and even clients already use it - it will now be quite difficult to switch in fact). I'm sure they realise this, I think it's already made them a bit lazy compared to their competitors, but I think they overestimate their position - there aren't that many Skype users yet that that a [new] competitor couldn't outgrow them. According to my Skype client there are typically between 3 and 5 million users on at any given time. That's miniscule compared to what the total number of VoIP users will be in 5 or 10 years. You're supposed to wait until you've really cornered a market before you start trying stupid stunts like this.
Uninstalling Skype in Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Low Blow (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, he's completely right. Competition in the economic sense and as the justification of and reason for the efficiency of a capitalistic free market economy is narrow competition with quality and price, driving efficiency of resource allocation.
You can 'compete' in other ways, as a game of 'winning' or 'losing', but as you step out of pure economic competition you are actively damaging the economy and the wealth of your society as a whole by actively preventing the creation, and availability, of value at optimum resource cost.
In its economic implications, it's no less harmful than actually running around damaging public property, it's just less traceable and immediately obvious, as missed opportunity costs are difficult to calculate.