U.S. politicos fire at EU's Microsoft ruling

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No

Competition in general will, over the long term, usually result in lower prices (this is not a hard and fast absolute, as many wish it to be, but in general, it is true).

However, this particular ruling, at least in the short term, does nothing to lower prices. MediaPlayer is free to download. The price will not be lowered because it cannot be. Microsoft is not, as a result of this ruling, forced to offer a lower-cost version of Windows; they are forced to offer a version of Windows without MediaPlayer. Since that is a "free" product (obviously, there were costs and they were built into the price of the product, but since they offer it free for download, they will not sell a version without it for less), this will not drive down costs. They could lower the price, say, $10, and start charging $20 for media player (or you could buy the bundled version for the price in the middle), but that would 1) probably violate the ruling, 2) end up costing the consumer more, and thus raising prices, 3) hurt their market share as other players are available for free. So it is unlikely they will do that, so prices will remain the same, and this ruling, while helping competition (which I did not argue with you on), will not lower prices.

This ruling is designed to foster competition in the media player market. Which is a group of mostly free products (for which you can then purchase upgraded products, raising the cost to the consumer). So, I don't see this particular competition lowering prices. It will, most likely, increase competition by allowing competitors larger market share, and we may see better products as a result.

Since the products are free, it is likely most OEMs will continue to do as they do now; bundling multiple apps on every machine they sell, with the only new difference being that you could actually fully remove the MS player if you didn't want it. Third party apps will be affected, so I don't think most OEMs want to be the first to offer a PC that some existing software breaks on.

The long-term effects of this remain to be seen, but by the time they come about, this industry will have changed yet again and they may be irrelevant.

Posted by: pschroeder@...   Posted on: 03/26/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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