[opendtv] EC and Microsoft
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "OpenDTV (E-mail)" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2004 18:37:58 -0400
Interesting perspective. The fuss is more about WM9 than about PCs.
Bert
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EC vs. Microsoft is consumer market's fight
By Junko Yoshida, EE Times
March 25, 2004 (3:09 PM EST)
URL: http://www.eet.com/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=3D18402663
In covering the European Commission's efforts to regulate Microsoft,
most of the U.S. press missed the point.
The American media dwelled myopically on whether the EC remedy imposed
on Microsoft would bring any meaningful changes to the personal-computer
landscape. But the European antitrust proceeding dealt less with the
issues covered in RealNetworks' suit against Microsoft than with the far
broader implications for the future of consumer electronics.
Put simply, Europe's non-PC-centric electronics business is under siege.
Microsoft's monopoly on the PC market has already earned the software
giant the power to dictate to the industry as it formulates decisions on
digital consumer specifications and standards. Microsoft has achieved a
virtual veto on how the engineering community designs next-generation
mobile phones, portable audio and video players, digital camcorders,
set-tops and high-definition DVD systems.
Bundle of trouble
Consider the emerging high-definition DVD system spec. Microsoft has
talked some Hollywood studios into encoding certain films in Microsoft's
proprietary Windows Media Player. By bundling Media Player into its
overwhelmingly dominant Windows operating system, Microsoft can
legitimately claim that the PC is the most popular platform among
consumers for the playback of next-generation HD DVD disks.
Consumer electronics manufacturers are advised to cooperate in this
bloodless coup. If they fail to incorporate enough memory and processing
power to decode Microsoft's Windows Media Player in new standalone
high-definition DVD systems, they might live to regret having asserted
their independence.
This future is not so traumatic, perhaps, for fixed consumer systems.
But that does not apply to mobile handsets and portable consumer media
players, whose resources are constrained by cost, memory and power
consumption.
Europe is heading for a new smart phone standard called DVB-Handheld,
built on the convergence of terrestrial digital TV broad-casting and
mobile com-munications networks. Deeply suspicious of Microsoft as "a
monopolist," most DVB members working on the DVB-H standard don't want
to acquiesce to Microsoft's Windows Media Player. Yet they may have to,
if Microsoft's yet-to-be-disclosed licensing terms are reasonable, and
if Microsoft continues to co-opt the broadcast and content
creation/distribution industries.
Any good design engineer can develop a consumer device capable of
reading multiple codecs, PC-style. But unless you are Microsoft, it's
arrogant and wasteful to force your consumers to give up, as one
observer put it, "precious hard-disk drive space to download multiple
codecs."
If the EC fails to apply relentless scrutiny and sensible constraints
on Microsoft's monopolistic tendencies, Europeans have every reason to
fear for a loss of both control of and innovation in the non-PC market.
At stake is not PC technology but the future of consumer electronics
platforms.
Paris-based Junko Yoshida covers consumer electronics for EE Times.
Copyright =A9 2003 CMP Media, LLC
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