[NTLUG:Discuss] EU Experts back antitrust plan against Microsoft

[Steve Baker]

Wayne Dahl wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-03-16 at 18:34, Steve Baker wrote:
> 
>>What's *FAR* more important is whether they are mandated to document and open
>>up the '.wmf' and other file formats.  It sure would be nice if mplayer could
>>play wmf files.
> 
> 
> Is this the ultimate point of all this?  The format is proprietary and
> no one has figured out how to duplicate it (play it from other players)
> or is the format itself a licensed format, requiring a licensed product
> to be able to play it?  If it's just a new format, I would think it
> would only be a matter of time before the coding for it was reverse
> engineered so other players could play it too.

Well, it's probably quite hard to reverse engineer.  Movie formats have
all sorts of weird compression tricks and frame-to-frame coherency.  Then
there is the issue of whether making a decoder for it would get you tossed
into the legal system under the DMCA or because you infringed some patent
or something.

If Microsoft's ability to monopolise file formats is a key factor in locking
out competition.   You can easily write software that works better than M$
code - sell it cheaper (or even give it away) but unless you can more or
less perfectly reproduce their file formats, the fact that 95% of the
world is using M$ file formats will make it almost impossible to break
into their markets.

It's VERY frustrating being unable to play a movie clip off the web
under Linux because the owner stored it in WMF instead of MPEG...or
being unable to fill in a form that's required at work because it's a
doc file that OpenOffice can't quite lay out correctly.

Requiring M$ to open up and fully document their file formats would
be the cleanest (and fairest) way to break their monopoly.   They can
argue (perhaps truthfully) that their browser or their media player
is so tied up with the OS that it can't be removed - but they would
have no excuse whatever for not releasing their file format information
with no strings attached - if required to do so by a court of law.

Doing so would not break any of their software - it wouldn't reduce
their "ability to innovate" - it wouldn't cause any loss of profits
*except* those they gain through illegally exploiting their monopoly
status.   If (as M$ claim), they sell the most software because their
software is better and has lower 'cost of ownership' - then they'd
have nothing to lose by opening their file formats to the competition
because people would STILL buy whichever software was better/cheaper.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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