Time For Anti-Trust 2.0? 435
An anonymous reader writes, "PC manufacturer Acer is complaining that Microsoft has jacked up the price of Vista, and that the basic versions are so basic no one will ship them. Since the collapse of the Microsoft anti-trust case under the Bush administration in 2001, manufacturers have no choice but to accede, adding hundreds of dollars to the cost of each PC. With Gates now proclaiming victory over European regulators, Microsoft once again seems unstoppable. But Microsoft had drawn itself
close to the Republican Party.
With the Republicans now evicted from the House and Senate, is it time to
look at the Microsoft anti-trust suit?
Could Microsoft be compelled to lower its inflating Vista prices,
or to open their tech or even supply funding
to Linux-flavored Windows such as Wine? What do Slashdot readers think about the likelihood of another go at breaking up the Windows monopoly?"
Antitrust because of prices? no thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
I welcome high prices on w32. There are alternatives, said manufactures could just install one of those.
Now, if the prices dependent on not selling anything by w32, I can see the point, and that should be fined so heavily that they never, ever dream of doing it again.
Re:Antitrust because of prices? no thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
You are missing the point.
As a monopoly, they don't have to worry about competition in their core business when they set prices. They are probably pretty aware of the price point at which people will give up and go to Linux or MacOS.
The existence of alternatives doesn't preclude having a monopoly, nor does having a monopoly preclude the existence of alternatives. It only has to be impractical for most consumers to choose an alternative.
Antitrust is there to ensuer that alternatives are remain for the consumer by protected those alternatives from unfair competition. However, charging high prices is not a form of unfair competition. As you point out, it is good for the alternative vendors, just bad for consumers.
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Personally...I use Linux. And I like it. But between the lack of plugins for web browsing, the incredibly difficulty of installing things, and the lack of any real good compatibility for windoze apps, it's nowhere near good
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I have flash disabled (actually, I never installed it since I find the EULA too nasty), and if a site requires it, I just move on to the next site. Only a tiny fraction (1 or 2%) of the sites I try to visit require it, though many more need it for their ads to work (which is the reason I would disable it even if it were installed).
As far as installation goes, what good are programs for MS OSs if virtually all have a EULA that I'm not willing to sign? A
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That's just great. If everyone could get by with 10 year old programs, that'd be a perfect solution.
Hm... I was a liberal before I read this thread... (Score:2, Interesting)
But this thread is dangerous:
"if major pc manufacturers start shipping pcs without windows, they lose their discount pricing on windows & other ms software"
"In addition, there should be no "incentives" of any kind"
C'mon guys, we believe in a free market here. What's needed is for a manufacturer or two to grow a pair, offer preinstalled Linux, and put some effort behind it. Some mar
Re:Hm... I was a liberal before I read this thread (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, sadly I can't provide a citation for this (although hey, this is Slashdot-- citations are for wimps, right?), but I was under the impression that the deal worked something like this:
In the post-Dell world of low-margin commodity PC's, the difference is likely to be at least $100, possibly more. Hell, there are even things like 'co-marketing' grants from the likes of MS and Intel, where the OEM gets money in return for putting MS or Intel prominently in their advertising, and I'm sure that the MS one offsets most of the remaining cost of the Windows licenses. However, when you're competing for a slice of the $500 PC market, you don't want your $25 copy of Windows to start costing $150 now. Or, in the case of Vista, $200 or more (because no-one wants the basic versions, as Acer suggests). Now, if you don't get favourable pricing, your offering either costs $700 compared to the competition's $500, or else you're going to lose money on every unit sold.
It's not the potential markup on a $1400 PC that hurts -- it's the markup on a $400 or $500 PC that hurts, because the retail price of Windows will increase that by a fairly noticeable percentage.
-Q
Re:Hm... I was a liberal before I read this thread (Score:4, Insightful)
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The problem is that W. is still in control of the DOJ. It is going to take a president with a DOJ that obeys the laws (and preferably is et
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It is possible to be a monopoly and still have competitors. Take a read of the DOJ vs MS findings of fact and you will see how Microsoft uses its pricing model to force pc makers to bundle the software.
OSX only works on Apple machines (unless you know what your doing to install it) and Linux, well how many major distributors of Linux on the Desktop can you find? Answer = None.
A monopoly is not good for capitalism and the complaints about MS
Re:Antitrust because of prices? no thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
We can start fixing that by paring back on the runaway government entitlement program called "copyright". Few people seem to remember that just a few decades ago binary object files were not generally considered to be copyrightable at all. If push back against ever-expanding government meddling and move back to that interpretation, then the whole problem with Microsoft interfering with the free market would go away.
Re:Antitrust because of prices? no thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, MS's approach is one example of a standard anti-free-market practice that monopolies, duopolies, cartels and such have used for centuries.
It's not a secret that hardly any of the distributors pay "list price" for Windows. The usual sort of anti-competitive contract is used: You get a "special" lower price if you don't sell any competing products. The list price is made high enough that all the distributors take the contract. This effectively locks out startups from the distribution channels.
A textbook example in the US is the way that so many stores and gas stations have either Coke or Pepsi vending machines, but not both. A retail outlet that tries to provide both can be hit with a higher wholesale price for both.
Some US states have outlawed this sort of contract, and in those states, you can get more choice and competition. But there are limits to how effective any but the largest states can be. With companies the size of Microsoft and Dell, such a state law is rather meaningless.
Anyway, MS's management doesn't expect to get list price for Windows from hardly anyone but retail customers trying to upgrade. The main point of such prices is to maintain the lock on retail distribution channels via "special" discounts to distributors.
With computers, a "free market" has never existed, and probably never will. We've always had one 800-pound-gorilla with the ability to lock out most of the competition, except for specialized niche markets that don't much interest the big guy. In such a situation, competition can never develop, at least not without government "interference" via pro-market laws.
Re:Antitrust because of prices? no thanks (Score:5, Informative)
That's no longer the case with Microsoft. The reason computer sellers still put Windows on every computer is to keep their bulk OEM license price down. If they lower the number of Windows licenses they purchase the price goes up. That would then raise the price of their computers.
One of the few positive things to come out of the anti-trust case was the Microsoft "penalty" for selling competing produts.
Re:Antitrust because of prices? no thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
I would have bought that argument 20 years ago, but no longer.
"Free Enterprise" is no longer about freedom to do business.
It is NOW about NAFTA shipping jobs out of the country to the benefit of a few owners.
It is about hiring illegals to avoid taxes - again so owners can profit AND avoid paying taxes.
It is about making copyright terms last centuries, thus depriving society of any real benefit of an invention.
It is about academic researchers doing research with gov money and then personally patenting discoveries tax payers paid for in order to charge exhorbant "license" fees.
It is about health insurance companies "coordinating" benefits so that the gov pays first and they pick up the difference, but still collect the FULL premium.
It is about EULA's, DRMs, and other unholy contracts that remove freedoms which the Constitution says are "inalienable".
It is about seven mansions and other perks that greedy people aspire to, no matter how many thousands of employees lose their saving, pensions, retirements, savings and homes.
It is about having offices in one state but doing retail sales out of Nevada, to avoid their fair share of taxes, all the while lecturing Oregonians about not paying their fair share of taxes.
It is about calling your customers thieves, and treating them as such and sending out BSA thugs, with police to protect THEM, to raid your businesses for not paying for "protection".
I could go on, because the list is becomming endless. The basic problem is that an artifical legal device, the "corpus" now has MORE rights and protections that a REAL, LIVING person.
Damn right. (Score:4, Insightful)
In general, the proponents "free enterprise" can't define it. In special cases, they can, but choose not to, and play games instead (i.e. talking about "free trade" rather than the end of labor regulation, which is what that really means).
Strictly speaking there is no such thing as a "Free Market" - only anarchy, where markets do not exist, and the strong rule the weak. All markets run on rules. "Free Enterprise" is lately becoming a code for Laissez Faire capitalism, a ruinous permutation of the rules that was a notorious economic and social disaster.
The more socialist policies that America has (until recently) employed for the last 50 years, by comparison, are what actually "made this country so great." You had laissez faire in South America - where did it get them? Meanwhile our bitter lessons learned from the Great Depression led us to socialist-lite economic policies that created the wealthiest nation on earth.
Capitalism is not some magic religious trinket you can wave over a society and create a utopia. It's a class of machine. It needs to be well-designed, tuned, and maintained.
For it to work, you have to foster competition through (for instance) vigorous use of antitrust law. There's no market if one participant can prevent any other potential players from entering the market. Elementary. Or are they re-writing those history books these days?
Wealth begets wealth, so the Christians say - but it's obvious that money does make money. You also need systems that redistribute the wealth (for instance, our once-great public educational system). Stratification of capital leaves you with a few people who have orders more money they can ever spend, while everyone else lacks education, leisure, and even basic buying power. And why do you care, Mr. Libertarian? Our economy is 2/3's consumer spending. Doh. It's also powered by a millions-strong, well educated middle class.
Re:Antitrust because of prices? no thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Those damn liberals are probably going to commit tons of funding and manpower tilting at windmills. Heyyy wait a minute. . .
Or you could look at it tinged by reality and realize split Executive and Legislative branches, not party dominance, is what keeps government small and budgets manageable.
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size of government (Score:3, Informative)
If George W. Bush wasn't there to stop their evil plans we'd be looking at stagflation, runaway tax increases, enormous increases in the size of our federal government, and massive amounts of new regulations on our businesses that will make it impossible for them to compete with foreign competitors.
Really funny. Not! Bush has increased the size of government and took the US from the biggest budget surplus to the biggest budget deficit ever. Republicans are supposedly fiscally conservative but while th
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The conservative movement died November 7th, 2000 when millions of conservatives voted for George W. Bush - and effectively trashed their own principles. The headstone was ordered in 2004, and will be placed on the gravesite in January 2009.
R.I.P.
I was a real fan of Barry Goldwater.
Re:Reason why they arent alternatives: (Score:4, Insightful)
No way. For many distros, you get HUNDREDS of applications (often even THOUSANDS) right out of the box.
There are two major issues:
- Hardware support
Want to run that $30 inkjet? Good luck.
Want to run that $50 scanner? Good luck. You will have to hunt down firmware and load it up (firmware which SHOULD be flashed onto the device itself in the first place but isn't)
Want to sync your PocketPC/Cellphone/etc.? Good luck. Using your cellphone as a modem is a cinch - plug and play (easier than it is in Windows) but syncing your address book or retrieving photos is a different story
Want to use that WiFi card? Good luck. You will have to hunt down firmware and load it up (firmware which SHOULD be flashed onto the device itself in the first place but isn't)
Want to register your cable modem? Sorry, Adelphia requires that you run their software to register. I had to practically insult a phone rep to get them to give me the URL to register the cable modem. They don't 'get' the fact that there are operating systems besides Windows.
- Microsoft's FUD
PHBs believe glossy cut sheets and shiny advertisements, even if the TCO and uptime stats are outright lies.
Actually there is one third hindrance:
- Attitudes: almost invariably the response to "why doesn't program $foo do X?" is "it's open source, code it yourself." Yeah, way to win converts there buddy!
It is obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
They should have been broken up before, and they should now.
No one, or company should be allowed to act this way in any modern society.
Cheers.
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Yeah, Novell was just dragged, kicking and screaming, into a dark alley and forced to sign that one, weren't they! Not. [novell.com]
This is about Novell making more money by having broader services and options to offer their customers, and about Microsoft doing the same.
Arrogance? Would you rather that every company that's striving to keep its millions of investors and thousands of employees happy, and not just
Re:It is obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
What, charging the price that the market will bear? If you don't like it, do what I did and install Linux.
The world would be a much better place if people looked after their own business rather than crying for the government to come and help them all the time.
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Except that Microsoft is relying on our government to enforce its patents and copyrights, all of which is supposed to be for the public good. If Microsoft is going to break the rules and show disdain for the public good, and they really want the government to stay out of it, then how about they stay all the way out of it and stop enforcing Microsoft's IP?
I know we sometimes get into a mode of thinking where "capitalism" is used to justify an attitude of corporate entitlement. Still, I think it's worth not
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Actually, it seems to be you who has an insufficient understanding of the issue - what corporations have done is take that original, VALID justification for copyright and manipulate it to their own purposes. THEY say the same thing that our founders did when the founders codified those rights into the Constitution - only the corporati
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If cost is an issue with the OEMs, Apple tends to gain here.
Re:It is obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
You make it sound as if that is always a viable option. Perhaps for ones home computer, but often not for companies. In many industries Windows and MS Office is the de facto standard. Also, even when it is possible, switching a reasonably large organisation to Linux isn't exactly cheap either. Change is expensive -- especially when the monopolists are experts at vendor lock-in.
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XP will be supported fully for 2 years after the release of Vista, and will get extended support [microsoft.com] for 5 years after that. Companies can get XP security updates until 2014.
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That is a bit like asking "What is smarter, ending all wars or keep waging war?". If it was entirely in my power to choose the software market landscape, then obviously I would alter it. The point is that it isn't in my power to do so.
This is a typical example of the prisoners dilemma [wikipedia.org]: If everyone switched at the same time, everyone would be a winner. But the optimal decision for each single player is to keep doing everything the same way, sin
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In a perfect world that would be possible for everyone. Unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world and there are factors which, to this day, hinder the migration process. We are talking about certain specialized software which doesn't have a linux version, like tailored legacy software or even fundamental tools like autoCAD (no, running it over WINE is not a serious option).
Another factor which voids that "just install linux" option is the lac
MS Linux or MS Windows (Score:2)
Basic version? Yes, please! (Score:2)
Re:Basic version? Yes, please! (Score:5, Interesting)
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You can't blame Microsoft for poor amateur coding. Oh wait maybe you can! But seriously it wouldn't be the first time an open source developer had forgotten or neglected something, and it's not the fault of anyone but said open-source developer.
Not for a long time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Mind you, I particularly don't care much for MS, however if anti-trust can break its monopoly, I do believe that it will bring about a great revolution in software quality that will be seen for many years to come. More competition = better choices for us. =)
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There was never a popular majority demanding the break-up of Microsoft. Anti-Trust sentiment in the U.S. is notoriously short-lived and the long-term consequences of a break-up are always second-guessed. Standard Oil. AT&T.
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Who is president is relevant, because that would be how the voice of the people would have to make their complaint. Of course, your point that this is not likely to be a major issue anytime soon (for various reasons) is true as well.
Fool's errand (Score:2, Interesting)
Plus, I say let them jack up prices. Let manufacturers hurt. It may convince them to introduce Ubuntu pre-loaded machines. Why not? It doesn't require a complete changeover, just a quiet new line of products. Snowball effect, at some point. Surely they see the trend of the snowball coming their way, anyhow.
Or price the same machines without
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Except with every antitrust action ending in MS victory to date, what would stop them from pulling their licensing agreement with any company that bundled linux?
That threat will keep the manufacturers in line. Sure it would be the boldest violation yet, but any manufactuerer involved would be bankrupt before it was resolved.
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MS- loses 20% of their sales (probably less since most people would just buy a different commodity PC)
Dell- loses 95% of their sales
What does MS gain? The allegance of all the other commodity PC makers.
What does Dell gain? A swift death.
Submission is a troll (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth:
1. OEM Windows licenses are nowhere close to "hundreds of dollars". You'll still be able to buy $500 PCs
2. Force to open to WINE?!?!?! Are you smoking crack? The judge migh, literally, laugh.
3. Microsoft has not "won" over EU regulators yet. This is only one battle.
4. Just because we have a democratic congress is no reason to look for revenge "killings." Yes, MS is a Monopoly that totaly abuses it's position in a way that's damaging to its competition, but have you heard we're at war? The new congress should look at MS again before too long, but definately not right now. They have far more important work to do.
I'm glad people are still interested in this subject, but you definately need to start looking at this realistically. This isn't so much a start as an unrealistic rant.
TW
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Re:Submission is a troll (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nancy Pelosi is far too politically savvy to fight that battle. She grew up in Baltimore political family; she knows how to get things done and how to pick wha
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You can say than for almost all of the submissions here
Really, this is not a news site for a long time now.
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except you should not have to jump through ridiculous hoops to get the money back for a bundled OEM install you never wanted [linuxworld.com]... that $500 PC should really be $400 without the "Windows tax"... [wikipedia.org]
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Pricing themselves out of the market (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pricing themselves out of the market (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be nice if it was true but you can only price yourself out of the market if there are alternatives in that market. Much as we love Linux, as far as most consumers and businesses are concerned, it's still not in that market.
So Vista's real rival is...WinXP. What inflated prices will do is simply delay the roll-out of Vista. Companies will almost certainly wait until their next hardware upgrade cycle at which point they will have little choice but to go with Vista anyway.
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Who buys retail (Score:2, Redundant)
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Must be some good stuff in there to justify blowing the hell out of these social-services organizations' budgets.
Maybe if there'd been some sort of wa
Vista Only (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody has mentioned the fact that within a few months of release, Vista will be the ONLY Microsoft operating system you can get on an OEM PC. You won't be able to buy an XP machine anymore because Microsoft doesn't want you to. In a free market, Windows XP would become cheaper and due to the fact that it's battle-tested, will probably be more desirable for some time, than Vista.
But there is not a free market, is there? You can't buy an OEM PC without paying some sort of windows tax, with few exceptions. And the latest windows tax is Vista.
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In a free market, Windows XP would become cheaper and due to the fact that it's battle-tested, will probably be more desirable for some time, than Vista.
What other commercial software are you thinking of that behaves like this ?
Re:Vista Only (Score:5, Insightful)
In a free market, a merchant can choose to stop selling something if he wants to sell something else instead.
Re:Vista Only (Score:4, Insightful)
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And I think the main reason they stopped offering it was that so few people ordered WinME on the computer that it wasn't cost-effective to offer that choice anymore.
Besides all that, there's 2 more things wrong with the whole scenario:
1) PC Manufacturers will simply ship the cheapest version on the default PCs that get sent to stores and offer the
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Funny, the PC I'm working on right now will be available with a different operating system in March. That operating system is OS X. Even funnier - it will also run Vista, once a few adjustments have been made to the firmware.
PC means "personal computer," i.e., the product description of the orignal Apple II. Then IBM made it a product name. If you're talking about
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Re:Vista Only (Score:4, Insightful)
The great difference is that there are several competing car manufactureres: If I don't like the new models that Ford puts out, I might go and look at the offerings from Chevrolet, Mazda, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, Peugeot, Kia, Hyundai, Toyota, Dodge, Honda, BMW, and so forth. Any and all of these will offer useful models that are effectively compatible with each other, to the extent that I can sit myself in the drivers's seat, close the door, start the engine and hit the road. Only the position of switches for lights and windshield wipers will be slightly different; the gearshift and parking brake may also have any of a small handful of locations, but they will be there somewhere.
Now if I don't like the latest version of Windows, there is no real alternative. It is not that I (or my customers) have many other options. There are Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and so on, that can do much of the same, and actually does do a number of things better but does not do certain other things at all. It is as if the only maker of passenger cars decided to offer just one new model I didn't like, and the only alternatives apart from older passenger cars that may or may not run reliably or even legally anymore, were a rich selection of limousines, lorries, big-rigs, juggernauts, buses, trucks, and dumpers ... excellent for heavy-duty and professional work and built to last, but not really the most suitable vehicles for taking the family out to a movie show.
The devil is in the details -- how many times now have I warned people against using Outlook, and set them up with the mail-client in Opera, and then the next week they come with their new mobile phone that has this cable that allows it to hook up to an USB-port, but the software making this communication work only wants to talk with Outlook, and doesn't even understand that there might be alternatives. So Opera gets pushed aside and Outlook is being used for its nice interoperability with the phone. This is the sort of thing that will make Windows continue having a large market share, indeed, a monopoly.
The justice dept is not run by democrats. (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting (Score:3, Funny)
server != client (Score:2, Insightful)
The only thing that prevents them from extending their client-side monopoly to the server is the threat of government regulation. Otherwise, it is simple a question of letting the clients refuse to talk to "unauthorized" servers.
another day, another FUD story (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Jim Wong, senior corporate vice president of the Taiwan-based company, the issue is simply that the basic home edition of Vista, Home Basic, which is available for preorder on Amazon.co.uk for 154.99 pounds ($293), is so basic that users will be forced to move to Vista Home Premium, at 189.99 pounds ($359).
First of all, they got the prices of Vista wrong: Vista Home Basic (non-upgrade) is 185 GBP [amazon.co.uk]; Vista Home Premium is 224 GBP [amazon.co.uk].
Second, price-conversion. Everybody knows that you don't take the street price of a product in British pounds, run it through xe.com, and come out with the street price in USD. Microsoft's MSRP on Vista Home Basic (non-upgrade) is $199 USD [microsoft.com], -not- $293 as given in the article. Vista Home Premium (non-upgrade) is $239 USD [microsoft.com]. Note that the MSRP on XP Home Edition is $199 USD [amazon.com], the same as Vista Home Basic.
Third, Microsoft has never sold an edition of Windows with the Media Center included on the retail market, so in a way there isn't really any good point of comparison.... of -course- it's going to be more expensive than XP Home.
"The new (Vista) experience you hear of, if you get Basic, you won't feel it at all," Wong told PC Pro magazine. "There's no (Aero) graphics, no Media Center, no remote control."
Yeah well, guess what? some people just don't want or need that stuff. Actually, I'd hazard a guess and say that the vast majority of users don't want or need Media Center functionality or a remote control. That's not what's worth harping on about. Home Premium does have a lot of neat things in it, especially for mobile users, media centers, tablet PC owners, etc., but it's useless for a lot of people who just use their computer to get stuff done.
Wong also said that the manufacturer's license for Vista Home Premium is 10 percent more expensive than for XP Home.
It's also got far more functionality (Media Center, new mobility features, XBox 360 connectivity, Tablet PC features) than XP Home Edition or Vista Home Basic Edition, the latter of which Acer is refusing to sell to its customers.
"We have to pay more but users are not going to pay more," Wong said. This would mean an increase in the cost to PC manufacturers of 1 percent to 2 percent, according to Wong, in a business where the profit margin is around 5 percent or less.
Quit your bitching, Mr. Wong. If the price of Windows is going up by 10% because you are choosing to force a higher edition on your customers, you pass that price increase on to users... it's not your job as a company to absorb price increases from Microsoft.
At the top of the Vista lineup is the Ultimate Edition, which can be preordered for 325 pounds ($614) and, again, is significantly more expensive than the XP operating system it replaces.
Ultimate Edition is covers a lot more ground than XP Professional. The thing comes with Media Center, twice as many games (good ones, too, like Chess and Majongg), backup software that doesn't suck, a bunch of extra software and add-ons analogous to the XP Plus! Pack, and even a friggin' UNIX stack to boot -- and that's not even going into
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There's this little thing called inflation; maybe you've heard of it? It means that, broadly speaking, prices go up with each passing year. The last desktop version of Windows was released 5 years ago; a 10% price increase accounts for less than 2% inflation per year. Sounds about right to me, at least for the UK.
OLPC as the big example (Score:2)
The point. Computers are overpriced not only because of the cost of proprietary software but also because of the cost of the rat rac
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You discount games. I call bullsh*t on that one, and here's why. While Second Life, World of Warcraft, or any of the large number of that style of game might not seem to be "important", it is.
The whole idea of making sure that poor people can afford a computer is so you don't create a two-tier society of "techno-haves" and "techno-have-nots". You say, "well, get gaming kit" but in reality, a $100 "it runs no games" computer and a $200 "
Short Answer: (Score:2)
Congress != Attorney General
Try again after 2009 January 20.
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Unbundling (Score:2)
1) Enforce all existing antitrust laws (this is not being done)
2) Require that computer manufacturers not be allowed to bundle/include an MS-Windows license
3) Prevent MS from trying to lock the OS license to a particular computer
Never gonna happen, but it is nice to dream. None of the other so-called anti-trust penalties against Microsoft have had any teeth/impact. If you could ONLY buy com
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Right now, Microsoft has way more regulatory power than the government in the computer industry. Microsoft *does* coerce. Microsoft *does* force. Microsoft has the power to do those things, and they do them. That's why the were conv
"Linux-flavored Windows" (Score:5, Insightful)
W T F
Actually thats what i expect exactly ! (Score:2)
Bad idea (Score:2)
The reason why is because if they are allowed to continue to behave as a monopolist for a certain period of time, negative publicity resulting from their own continuing abusive and unethical actions will sink them in fairly short order. If they get broken up, while it might provide consumers with some remedy, it will also allow Microsoft to continue to exist,
We can't really have it both ways... (Score:2)
They don't *have* to ship Vista. Hell, people should be yelling at Apple to make a go of it with OSX. Then you'd have OEMs who could ship Windows, OSX, various flavours of Linux.
Crying over the cost of corruption ... (Score:2)
No, it's not a free market, and no, there is no choice! This is the simple truth of it for most people.
When the principles of free enterprise are corrupted and perverted to the profit of the privileged, it is the people who must pay the price their masters set.
Shed your tears not for the dollars lost, but rather for the freedoms spent.
victory over regulators ? (Score:2)
"It is therefore misleading to imply that the Commission could be the cause of delays in launching Vista in Europe."
"One of the remedies imposed by the decision was for Microsoft to disclose complete and accurate interface documentation [eu.int] which would allow non-Microsoft work group servers to achieve full interoperabilit
Monopoly? What monopoly? (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no monopoly. There is only a large marketshare. For the past ten years, during the very period of time everyone was telling me I had no choice, I have been using non-Microsoft systems. Currently I am using FreeBSD on my desktop and Mac OSX on my laptop. The only Windows I have is on my work-supplied laptop, and that's on a *secondary* partition. I can tell Bill Gates to "bite me" with no fear of repercussion.
Sun is still going strong (and still stuck in their perpetual layoff/hire cycle). Solaris is still the workstation of choice, whose chief competition comes from Santa Clara instead of Redmond.
Apple, the perpetually dying platform, is doing gangbusters. Sure, Microsoft gave them some money. But the very first thing they did with it was to come out with Safari and dump Internet Explorer. The OSX desktop is just starting to explode on the scene. I work with a lot of software companies, and most of them are moving into the Mac market for the very first time.
During the very height of the Microsoft monopoly, Linux went from an obscure kernel project to a major player in the server and embedded markets with lots of inroads to the desktop. And it's not just because Open Source is the equivalent of "price dumping", because the service side of things isn't inexpensive.
OpenOffice and Firefox have shown that high quality productivity tools don't need to come from Redmond.
So where's the monopoly? What is stopping me, or anyone else, from not using Microsoft products? It may be still be hard to find pre-bundled Linux systems, but pre-bundled Mac OSX systems are just one aisle over. That's just on the desktop side. On the server side only the true-blue Microsoft fan still uses Windows on the server.
In short, there is no monopoly.
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I actually don't think much needs to be done to break the Microsoft monopoly. Unlike when the first Anti-trust law was going on, there is now a real choice of operating system.
The variety of choice then was no worse (or better, it must be said) than it is now. *Especially* when you don't take hindsight into account.
There have *always* be viable, functionally equivalent alternatives to Windows (and all other pieces of Microsoft software).
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In my eyes, this functional equivalence would need to include the ability to use Visio stencils, or a replacement for all the existing stencils already in use. This isn't likely to happen anytime soon, I'm afraid.
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Not likely. The terms of the agreement between MS and the OEMs almost certainly includes a mandatory OS charge per unit sold, regardless of whether the user accepts MS's EULA or even whether the equipment ships with an alternate OS installed.
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Forcing users to pay for features they don't use is what an evil monopoly does.
By that measure, I can't think of a single company I've ever dealt with that doesn't qualify as an "evil monopoly".
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As for the Dems not having enough money to go after Microsoft or not having the authority I beg to differ.
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That's not true at all any more. One outcome of the antitrust case was to block Microsoft from doing this. What does happen now, however, is that i
Re:Why do you even use Windows? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't have much against Linux. Maybe I'm not sufficiently informed, maybe my entire life could be made simpler by a switch to Linux. But for now, Windows works.
You sir, should sit in the
** Windows almost never works 'right out of the box'. If you're using it that way, then your system is already compromised.
** You can use a mouse with right button in OS X. Or you just hold your click for 2 seconds to get the contextual menu.
** You're not sufficiently informed vis-a-vis Linux. Try a friendly distro like MEPIS or Ubuntu.
I was having problems with my video camera on my Windows machine. Worked like a charm on my Mac mini. Worked like a charm with my MEPIS box.
Never could get my wife's iPod to even be seen by the Windows box. Obviously the Mac saw it. MEPIS does too.
But boy, could I play games on the Windows box.
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Which brings me to another rant...
Why do I have to be totally beholden to the maker of my Linux distro for all my software, if I don't want that software to fe
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Considering most cars can be outfitted with a variety of options; and you can order a stripper with just the standard features or pay more for one fully loaded, then yes people can chose to pay more. Car dealers carry option laden vehicles because they make more money on them and most car buyers want the options; they aren't going to a car dealer to buy a stripper
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According to my completely unscientific data (web sites that I run etc.), Linux desktop marketshare is actually falling. The company I work for has just bought a suppo
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