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Technology Stocks : Microsoft Corp. - Moderated (MSFT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: miraje who wrote (10419)	12/9/2005 11:13:25 AM
From: Gottfried	Respond to of 19790

JB, re >the genius pundits on this thread have declared Windows Media Player to be dead< They may have tunnel vision. I regularly download free audio books from the public library. They are all wma files. iPod couldn't handle them [I think], but my iRiver mp3 player can. what's more, the only way I can transfer them to the player is by using Windows Media Player V10 [with digital rights management].

To: miraje who wrote (10419)	12/9/2005 4:25:43 PM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 19790

If Microsoft wins all cases in EU, it will probably end with market requirements like the ones for telecommunication. If they model it on the regulations we had for telecom around here lately, it would be something like "If any vendor has more than 80% market share, it must sell its products to vendors for reselling at a price set by the government, on a calculation based on current production costs". This basically meant that you could buy the same phone line, delivered by the same company, from a long list of companies, at different price levels and service levels. Some of the companies delivered almost no service and could resell the product at a very low cost. In telecom, the markets were divided into POTS, mobile etc. So the rules applied to any company providing more than 80% of the POTS connections, any company providing more than 80% of the mobile subscriptions etc. These regulations are generally seen as having been a success.