re: A little more on the Media Player Issue

William — Wed, 05 May 2004 16:36:00 GMT

Your comment about MS letting other vendors install stuff on new PC's, well, I totally concur. MS shouldn't interfere here if they want to claim it's all about competition. And hardware without software isn't worth a whole lot, particularly the OS, so ms can defintitely throw some weight around unfairly in this regard. And to that end, I agree with the vast majority of your points with a few small exceptions

As far as the price war... nothing is really free. Value is the metric here. A thrid party vendor could make a much better product than Microsoft's Product X and even at say $40.00 for instance, still provide a better value. Think of it this way, if I spend $0.00 and get something that provides $20.00 worth of value to me, or I spend $1,000,0000 to get something that provides $1,000,000,000,000,000 I'm much better off in the second case (i know, asssuming you had the million bucks in the first place, but you can use any numbers you want, just make the ratio larger on the one side).

Since nothing is really 'free' the ratio isn't really 20/0 vs 1,000,000,000,000,000/1,000,000 it's more like 20/0001 or some other non zero number. And the math works out. I'll agree though that it's darn hard to fight battles like this because it's hard to often create value like that .

As far as the source code issue. Look at Infragistics UltraWinGrid vs. DataGrid. Light years ahead of it. Look at how many third party controls there are out there. Even with a late start, they can kick butt in many segments. Other ones are a lot different, but having an Advantage doesn't mean a guaranteed win and there are a lot of examples that bear this out. the fact MS has lost some battles pretty much proves this don't you think?

As far as the government. They get fines and revenues. They get free publicity. Look at the Celebrity David Boies for instance got from the MS trial here in the US. Joe Klien etc. They used litigation to further their careers and in this instance, they are the government. There's an Anti-Spitzer law that congress put in place just to stop the abuses of Attorneys General like NY's Spitzer. He wasn't this aggressive without getting something in return.

As far as the judges go... well, they work for the government. It is common practice in law to "judge shop' wherein you find one friendly to your cause. Moreover, being a judge doesn't inherently do anything to make you less susceptible to outside influences. Every supreme court justice out there got there by voting record. And every aspiring judge knows this. Sure many of them keep it real. Many don't.. But siding with the govt all the time will surely have some benefits.

Thanks Skicow, I really appreciate having a pleasant dialog on stuff like this. Too often it gets really hostile in public forums and it's nice to hear an intelligent opposing option (although we probably agree more than disagree) expresed politely!

Bill

re: A little more on the Media Player Issue

William — Wed, 05 May 2004 13:06:00 GMT

Hi,

You have some valid points here and I'd like to reply to each one on it's own.

I agree that consumers benefit when two companies compete with each other by lowering prices and such, but if one company has the advantage of having their product (MS media player) already given to the consumer, how are other companies supposed to compete with that? How is there supposed to be a 'price war' when MS is not selling their media player, but giving it away for free?

I also agree with you 100% about the downloading phobia that some people have, and I would also love it if I didn't have to download and install anything.

MS has lots of great talent, and I agree that their products are nice as well, but I would like to also say that there are 3rd party apps that are better than some MS apps. ZoomPlayer is, IMHO, a much better media player than MS's media player. MS also has the benefit of knowing their Windows code and how it runs so that they can write apps that will out perform other 3rd party apps with ease, not because MS programmers are better than the 3rd party programmers, but because the 3rd party doesn't have access to the OS code, and can't 'tune' their code in ways that MS programmers know they should. Please note that I am in no way 'slamming' MS programmers, this is not the intent of the previous sentence, I just wanted to state that MS programmer have an edge over other 3rd party programmers when programming for the Windows OS. This is the main reason that I feel the 'playing field' is not level between MS and 3rd party programmers.

As for your final statement, I too use Google, and always have, they are the best search engine out there IMO. I think that the other instances that you provide are not part of what we are talking about, or at least what I'm talking about, the 90% of users who use their PC's for email, writing documents, and listening to music. They don't use IIS/Apache, etc. or even Quicken/Money on their computers. I believe that the reason that MS has not killed Apache/Quicken/Oracle, is because the people who use these are people who know that they have a choice of what to use, they know that there is something else out there other than IIS or SQL Server. The regular PC users don't know that there is another media player out there that may be better for them. I'm not saying that it's MS's responsibility to educate the normal user of their choices when it comes to media players, but I do think that MS should let 3rd party apps be installed on new PC's by vendors.

I love Windows, and I don't think other OS's like Linux are any better for the home desktop PC. I'm a big MS user, I can't believe how amazing VS 2003 is for programming VB, it’s a work of art. But I want to ask this question: How does MS being sued benefit the government? I don't think that the government hates MS and is judging unfairly against them for any reason. What reason would the government have to do this? And in the end, it's the judges that decide if MS is in the wrong.

skicow