4 ms·

It’d be a better world if Europe could give people more choices by... giving them more choices, instead of regulating the choices that other countries provide a

• luckylion 7y ago
  I'd really love to see that as well, but at the same time I have zero trust in our governments' ability to choose the right project/company/people to support/fund/subsidize. I do hope they consider pushing alternatives, but also that it's a more organic process where "the market" has some say and not a move to give plenty of money to a university/company only to shut the project down after a few years of failure.
• rchaud 7y ago
  The purpose of regulation is to change the environment to allow for a more level playing field. Where would Spotify have been if the EC didn't force MS to unbundle Windows Media Player from installs of Win XP in 2004? For those who don't remember, WMP 9 already had streaming radio via the MSN entertainment arm. Competition doesn't happen overnight. The changes need to be in place for some period of time before entrepreneurs consider a new product/software in that sector to be viable.
  • cameronbrown 7y ago
    This completely disregards mobile - without which Spotify was completely irrelevant. Un-bundling WMP, in the long run, did virtually nothing.
    • rchaud 7y ago
      Spotify started in 2008 with 40 million tracks and desktop and web clients only. Back then mobile streaming was a non-entity as the iOS and Android app stores had not launched. So the business case for Spotify was very much focused on desktop users, where WMP would have been the dominant competitor had it not been for the Microsoft case.