Long, but excellent, article by Steven Sinofsky (in charge of Windows when it went through the EU wringer) on Apple's DMA compliance

[Obioban]

https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/215-building-under-regulation

[Skiiwee29]

Please provide more context than just posting a link to start the discussion. Why do you find it interesting/excellent? What sticks out to you as being good, bad, harmful etc... 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Some good points, but clearly this person never dealt with people in the real world.

Quote

No one on the planet was unaware of what a browser was or that there were choices.

Anyone in tech support would disprove this in an instant.   It was a common joke how many people thought IE WAS "the Internet" and if you asked them to open the "web browser" they'd not know WTF you were talking about.

 

I'd be willing to bet plenty of people today think Chrome is the only web browser.  It doesn't matter if there are adverts, a none-technical person wont know what those adverts mean.  Us technical folk are the outliers even today, yes everyone uses tech, but only a minority understand what it actually is and how it works.  They just see "this icon lets me do x".

[Lurking]

7 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Some good points, but clearly this person never dealt with people in the real world.

Anyone in tech support would disprove this in an instant.   It was a common joke how many people thought IE WAS "the Internet" and if you asked them to open the "web browser" they'd not know WTF you were talking about.

 

I'd be willing to bet plenty of people today think Chrome is the only web browser.  It doesn't matter if there are adverts, a none-technical person wont know what those adverts mean.  Us technical folk are the outliers even today, yes everyone uses tech, but only a minority understand what it actually is and how it works.  They just see "this icon lets me do x".

I even doubt they know it is called "Chrome". They just call it Google. Or they even call Chrome "Internet Explorer" because that is what the Internet thingy used to be called. And if they hear (file) explorer, they may think of the browser.

 

Most people probably don't even know what Windows version they have or that there are versions. Because of the average user, IT departments install classic shells because people would call all day if an icon has a different color or location.

 

At my work there are people who call the PC "CPU" or just a "box" that the monitors plug in without realizing the PC actually does stuff. 

[LAwLz]

Sinofsky is a massive twat. I am not surprised that he is strongly against the DMA, a piece of legislation trying to keep giant tech companies from abusing their positions of power to lock users into their ecosystems. That is exactly what Sinofsky was trying to push (and in some regards succeeded) when he was at Microsoft.

 

I also think he is being a bit silly or maybe disingenuous when he says the legislation is "clearly aimed at specific US companies" and then goes ahead and lists companies like Samsung, ByteDance, Alibaba, AliExpress, Booking.com, and Zalando as also being affected. Is he aware that those companies aren't American? I mean, it is Sinofsky we're talking about so I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't know Samsung isn't from the US...

 

Maybe the issue isn't that "the legislation is aimed at US companies because the EU is evil and want to harm America!" but rather "a lot of the big companies that are abusing their power are from the US"?

 

 

There is so much bullshit in this article it's not even funny.

Things like claiming Apple has never abused their position of power and that no consumer has been harmed by the way Apple acts. I would argue that the 30% cut Apple takes is an abuse of their position. Especially since they forbid developers from telling users about for example cheaper rates on their website. Telling developers "no, you are not allowed to tell your users that they can subscribe to the service without also paying us, Apple, is not allowed and we will take away everything from you if you do" is not exactly a friendly and non-abusive way of handling your users or developers. Sinofsky might think that's not abusive because he looks up to Apple a lot and wanted Microsoft to be like Apple, but if he is going to claim that's perfectly fine, good and not an abuse of power then he is in my eyes a dumbass.

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Sinofsky is a massive twat. I am not surprised that he is strongly against the DMA, a piece of legislation trying to keep giant tech companies from abusing their positions of power to lock users into their ecosystems. That is exactly what Sinofsky was trying to push (and in some regards succeeded) when he was at Microsoft.

 

I also think he is being a bit silly or maybe disingenuous when he says the legislation is "clearly aimed at specific US companies" and then goes ahead and lists companies like Samsung, ByteDance, Alibaba, AliExpress, Booking.com, and Zalando as also being affected. Is he aware that those companies aren't American? I mean, it is Sinofsky we're talking about so I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't know Samsung isn't from the US...

 

Maybe the issue isn't that "the legislation is aimed at US companies because the EU is evil and want to harm America!" but rather "a lot of the big companies that are abusing their power are from the US"?

 

 

There is so much bullshit in this article it's not even funny.

Things like claiming Apple has never abused their position of power and that no consumer has been harmed by the way Apple acts. I would argue that the 30% cut Apple takes is an abuse of their position. Especially since they forbid developers from telling users about for example cheaper rates on their website. Telling developers "no, you are not allowed to tell your users that they can subscribe to the service without also paying us, Apple, is not allowed and we will take away everything from you if you do" is not exactly a friendly and non-abusive way of handling your users or developers. Sinofsky might think that's not abusive because he looks up to Apple a lot and wanted Microsoft to be like Apple, but if he is going to claim that's perfectly fine, good and not an abuse of power then he is in my eyes a dumbass.

when it looks like shit, smells like shit and tastes like shit, the only people who claim it is a bunch of flowers are the companies making money from it and the mentally twisted kids who don't know they have been fooled by the marketing.  The rest of us know shit when it's shoved in our faces.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Its the usual that, while a lot of what he says does makes sense in the context provided, its not necessarily the truth.

 

For example having a common API for media playback is good, but implying that this makes it impossible to allow other media players to hook using that API is just disingenuous.  By his own admission, printer drivers are third-party and can hook into OS, there just needs to be a consistent API implementation to do it so third-party vendors can target it.  Also he admits, media player and Internet Explorer were never designed to be replaceable, that's on them, not the third parties who might want to do so.

 

Sure its harder than the OS handling everything natively, but if the OS handled everything natively then what happens when you need a codec they do not support natively?  I always had the Media Pack installed when I had N edition Windows and can probably count on one hand how often it played back the video codecs I needed.

 

Sure the solution they came up with for these things suck, because they never designed Windows to be extensible for those things in the first place.  Which flies in the face of him constantly going on about Windows being an open platform.  He neatly glosses over the contrast between how they handled printer drivers vs media playback and the Internet browser.

 

Its also rather amusing considering WINE uses GECKO as its web engine, so clearly it could be done, if they had ever considered it as an option.  He goes on about security issues from allowing third party integration, yet embedding IE into the OS opened up huge security holes it took them forever to deal with, which could probably have been fixed had the browser engine been modular and replaceable.  Hooking it so deep into the OS caused those security problems.