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Those songs are in the AAC format, a variant of MPEG-4. Or if you measure it in terms of the number of commercial stores selling music in the Windows Media Audio format versus some other format.īut in terms of actual usage? Apple's iTunes Music Store owns about 70 percent of the market for legal downloads and has sold more than 2 billion songs. Say what? I suppose that's true if you define the relevant market as player installations-Paul Thurott reports Nielsen/NetRatings figures showing the Windows Media Player at 50 percent, with the RealPlayer at 22 percent and iTunes at 19 percent. As reported by Todd Bishop in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Kroes said, "Microsoft's media player format has, as a result of its conduct, come to dominate the market." In the wake of the ruling, EC Commissioner Neelie Kroes spoke at some length about the harm Microsoft has done to the consumers, but one statement made me check my eyesight. Lawyer and technologist Mary Kirwan, writing for The Globe and Mail, had an excellent write-up of the ruling as it relates to Windows/non-Windows interoperability, which I'm not covering here.)
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(The full ruling is available from the first link on this page-it's long.
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Especially from PC makers-the more different software alignments they have to install and support, the higher their expenses.) The company followed up with similar versions of Vista in 2007.Īs anybody who follows technology news now knows, yesterday a European court denied Microsoft's appeal on almost every count. (Even if the free Media Player version had been a few bucks cheaper, I don't expect there would have been much demand.
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But because it didn't have to offer any discount, almost nobody bought these versions at retail, and hardware makers didn't preinstall them. So Microsoft shipped versions of Windows XP without the the Media Player.
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Microsoft appealed, but was forced to comply while the appeal wound its way through the system. In 2004, the EC agreed, and (among other things) ordered Microsoft to ship a version of Windows without the Media Player in Europe. At some point along the way, RealNetworks complained that Microsoft was repeating its kill-Netscape tactic by bundling the Windows Media player into Windows. In 1998, the European Commission began investigating Microsoft on grounds that it was illegally using its desktop operating system (OS) monopoly to squeeze into new markets. Other stores are selling DRM-less MP3s, but not iTunes. iTunes did begin selling DRM-free songs earlier this year, but those files are still in the AAC format. Correction: this story has been corrected to remove the implication that iTunes sells audio files in formats other than AAC.