Microsoft vinner i USA – får förvärva Activision Blizzard

Detta kommer att sluta illa för World of Warcraft.

Jag ser ganska positivt på detta. MS har infört en hel del bra grejor för oss som både spelar på konsol och PC. Dels säkras alla spel på PC. Sony kommer inte kunna köpa till sig fördelar som är låsta till PS. Jag har köpt Diablo 4 på PC. Nu kommer förhoppningsvis MS lägga till sin "play anywhere" så jag kan spela på xboxen också utan att köpa spelet igen. MS är en av världens bästa arbetsgivare så även där ser jag fördelar.

Min PS5a kanske kommer samla än mer damm efter detta. Men förhoppningsvis gör detta att Sony skärper sig lite och försöker konkurrera hårdare. Sony har blivit så ledande att det är billigare för dem att betala för att tredjepartspel inte ska släppas på konkurrerande plattformarar istället för att satsa mer på egna.

Nä det var ett hypotetiskt uppköp av Sony, och spekulationer baserat på vilken affärsmoral och vilka affärsmetoder de visat prov på innan. Det är som du säger, relativt sett är de betydligt mer jämbördiga än MS/Sony.

Sen handlar det ju om att få en bättre förhandlingsposition, ingen vill stänga ute potentiella kunder långsiktigt. Oavsett om exklusivitet gynnar en konsol kortsiktigt så kommer det vara väldigt många andra som inte är villiga att byta, och Microsoft kan inte köpa hela världen heller.

Har du några exempel? Är nyfiken på vad du syftar på.

United States v. Microsoft Corporation, 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001), was a landmark American antitrust law case at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally maintaining its monopoly position in the personal computer (PC) market, primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java.

Microsoft Corp. v. Commission (2007; T-201/04) is a case brought by the European Commission of the European Union (EU) against Microsoft for abuse of its dominant position in the market (according to competition law). It started as a complaint from Sun Microsystems over Microsoft's licensing practices in 1993, and eventually resulted in the EU ordering Microsoft to divulge certain information about its server products and release a version of Microsoft Windows without Windows Media Player. The European Commission especially focused on the interoperability issue.

From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it.

In order to build the necessary respect and win the mindshare of the Internet community, I recommend a recipe not unlike the one we've used with our TCP/IP efforts: embrace, extend, then innovate.

Phase 1 (Embrace): all participants need to establish a solid understanding of the infostructure and the community—determine the needs and the trends of the user base. Only then can we effectively enable Microsoft system products to be great Internet systems.

Phase 2 (Extend): establish relationships with the appropriate organizations and corporations with goals similar to ours. Offer well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards that have been developed in the Internet community.

Phase 3 (Innovate): move into a leadership role with new Internet standards as appropriate, enable standard off-the-shelf titles with Internet awareness. Change the rules: Windows become the next-generation Internet tool of the future.
— J Allard, Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a propaganda tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling and cults. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information, and is a manifestation of the appeal to fear.

...

Microsoft
From the 1990s onward, the term became most often associated with Microsoft. Roger Irwin said:[11]

"Microsoft soon picked up the art of FUD from IBM, and throughout the '80s used FUD as a primary marketing tool, much as IBM had in the previous decade. They ended up out FUD-ing IBM themselves during the OS/2 vs Win3.1 years."

BrowserChoice.eu was a website created by Microsoft in March 2010 following a decision in the European Union Microsoft competition case. The case involved legal proceedings by the European Union against Microsoft and found that, by including Internet Explorer with their market-dominant Windows operating system, Microsoft had used this dominance to create a similar market position in the web browser market. The BrowserChoice.eu website was created to allow users that had not made, or were unaware of, a choice to try other browsers, and thus comply with the European Commission's ruling.

From its inception, Microsoft defined itself as a platform company and understood the importance of attracting third-party programmers. It did so by providing development tools, training, access to proprietary APIs in early versions, and partner programs. Although the resulting ubiquity of Microsoft software allows a user to benefit from network effects, critics and even Microsoft itself decry what they consider to be an "embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy of adding proprietary features to open standards or their software implementations, thereby using its market dominance to gain unofficial ownership of standards "extended" in this way.

The European Commission, in its March 24, 2004 decision on Microsoft's business practices, quotes, in paragraph 463, Microsoft general manager for C++ development Aaron Contorer as stating in a February 21, 1997 internal Microsoft memo drafted for Bill Gates:

"The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most ISVs [independent software vendors] would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead. It is this switching cost that has given customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO [total cost of ownership], our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties. […] Customers constantly evaluate other desktop platforms, [but] it would be so much work to move over that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move. In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago. The Windows franchise is fueled by application development which is focused on our core APIs."

There have been allegations that the ISO ballot process for Office Open XML was marred with voting irregularities and heavy-handed tactics by some stakeholders.

• An Ars Technica article sources Groklaw stating that at Portugal's national body TC meeting, "representatives from Microsoft attempted to argue that Sun Microsystems, the creators and supporters of the competing OpenDocument format (ODF), could not be given a seat at the conference table because there was a lack of chairs."

• In Sweden, Microsoft notified the Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) that an employee sent a memo to two of its partners, requesting them to join the SIS committee and vote in favor of Office Open XML in return for "marketing contributions".

Microsoft backtracked Wednesday on its much-derided policy that would have required Xbox One gamers to connect their consoles to the Internet once a day to prevent game piracy.

Microsoft faced a huge backlash when it announced the policy, just before the E3 video game conference earlier this month. Then, the company said it would allow gamers to play offline for up to 24 hours on a primary console, or 1 hour if they were logged onto a separate console accessing their library of titles. At that point, offline gaming would have been disabled until players re-establish a Web connection.

Bäst hade väl varit om inte MS köpte heller dock tror jag

Gör dom som med Minecraft

Microsoft har använt och använder DirectX för att låsa utvecklare och spel till deras Windows-plattform istället för att stödja den öppna OpenGL-standarden som också fungerar på andra operativsystem.

Tänkte mest på att man var tvungen att ha M$ konto för att spela. Varför inte bara få använda den inloggning man hade när man köpte spelet för typ 13 år sen. Jag skaffa dock inte konto utan avaktivera spelet.