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During Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Microsoft practices Thursday, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser showed that the installation of Microsoft's new Windows Media Player may disable RealNetworks' competing RealPlayer and its related products.
On Friday, following Glaser's lead, a group of streaming media companies joined a RealNetworks (RNWK) press conference to say their software, too, has suffered at the hands of Microsoft (MFST).
"This isn't simply a dispute between ourselves and Microsoft," said Glaser. To prove his point, he had a statement from Xing Technologies and was joined by executives from Digital Bitcasting and Netscape Communications.
Xing and Digital made general statements that Microsoft software, in the words of Shawn Cooney, chief technology officer for Digital Bitcasting, "runs roughshod over the [media] data types."
Microsoft says that the problems Glaser complained of in his Senate testimony amounted to a bug in RealNetworks' newest G2 streaming media software -- not software monopolization on the part of Microsoft. Microsoft detailed its testing in a white paper published on its Web site.
"To be honest with you, this is the most cut-and-dry thing on the face of the planet," said Microsoft's Gary Schare, lead product manager for Windows media technologies. "The [RealNetworks] G2 beta on [Internet Explorer] works fine." And Microsoft, he said, has clearly shown the company did not intend to break his G2 beta on Navigator.
Microsoft says that it's a simple matter pertaining only to the beta release of RealNetworks G2 player. Schare said the RealNetworks installer fails to make a single software link, which Microsoft considers a bug.
According to Microsoft's analysis, the failure of the link keeps G2 media streams encountered by Navigator from launching the G2 player. If the user has installed Windows Media Player, that software will launch instead, but will not be able to play the streaming content.
"This has nothing to do with Microsoft trying to sabotage Netscape Navigator," Schare said, or anybody else. How, he asked, would Microsoft benefit from causing its software to take over a media stream that it was unable to play?
Bob Lisbon, Netscape senior vice president of client products, said his company was working with RealNetworks to actively investigate testimony Glaser gave Thursday. "It's not yet complete, but everything we've seen thus far are that the contentions and testimony that Rob made [Thursday] are completely plausible.
"To suggest that this is a simple software bug is really misleading."
The software industry group Software Publishers Association (SPA) also joined the criticism of Redmond. "Microsoft's immediate denial of RealNetworks' concern is troubling," SPA President Ken Wasch said in a statement. "Microsoft's response fails to acknowledge that it would be wrong for the owner of the dominant operating system (or any other product vendor) to disadvantage a competing software product."
Wasch said at the RealNetworks conference that Microsoft's behavior violates one of the SPA's principles for fair competition in the software industry. "A software vendor should not intentionally disable, cripple, or otherwise interfere with the intended functionality and execution of other products," it reads. "Similarly, a vendor should not suggest that other products may be incompatible that are in fact known to be compatible."
For its part, Microsoft said RealNetworks perhaps had an agenda in bringing the issue up on the floor of the Senate.
"The evidence he [Glaser] used to do this in the United States Senate was completely faulty and in fact the entire case he showed the Senate was an error in his software," said Adam Sohn, a spokesman at Microsoft. "We have encouraged independent labs to reproduce this bug.... [It is a] little unfortunate that they [Real Networks] chose a forum like the US Senate to do what seemed ... to further their own business goals. We remain hopeful they will work with Microsoft to make sure all our products work well together and run great on Windows."
Schare said Microsoft is working with RealNetworks developers to resolve the issue.
