In the news: More trouble for Microsoft

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EU Plans Fine, Remedies for Microsoft 'Abuses'

Full article More atThe Register

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission said on Wednesday it intended to fine Microsoft for what it called continuing abuses of its dominant market position and force it to change the way it distributes its Media Player software.

In its strongest statement yet in its four-year antitrust probe against the world's largest software company, the EU also said it could order Microsoft to open up the code for its computer server software to outside firms.

An EU spokesman said the Commission felt it had a strong case against Microsoft and the amount of the fine would be linked to the severity and duration of Microsoft's perceived offence.

"At this stage, we have so much evidence and we are in possession of such substantive a file that we believe any decision we take will withstand scrutiny of the European court," Commission spokesman Tilman Lueder told a briefing.

Europe wants them to unbundle Media Player and "open up" the code for its server software. Plus a fine. No telling what "open up" means here, but hopefully it means making the interoperability specs, at least, available for free. (The corresponding US deal is a 'reasonable and nondiscriminatory' license for $100K or so, which cuts out the only real competition, the open-source Samba project.

Linux almost as easy to use as Windows

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The researchers studied how easily two groups of users could perform tasks using the different operating systems. One group consisted of 60 users between 25 and 55 with computer skills but no prior experience with Linux or Windows XP. They tested the pre-configured open source software according to various criteria, such as the ease of creating and administrating new and existing files, copying CDs, and performing some basic office tasks, such as composing a text and sending an e-mail.

The other group consisted of 20 users with the same qualifications who performed the exact same tasks on Windows XP.

The study findings suggest that it is almost as easy to perform most major office tasks using Linux as it is using Windows, which has a long history in the consumer market.

Linux users, for example, needed 44.5 minutes to perform a set of tasks, compared to 41.2 minutes required by the XP users. Furthermore, 80 percent of the Linux users believed that they needed only one week to become as competent with the new system as with their existing one, compared to 85 percent of the XP users.

The noteworthy thing about this study is that the users had no experience with Windows XP, but were almost certainly users of some kind of Windows. One wonders what the results would have been if the test had included installation -- my experiences installing Windows from scratch have been uniformly nightmarish.