The Eternal Sunshine of Mr. Vinje’s Spotless Mind

Just reading through the various clips about the EU v. Microsoft case that will be decided later today, and realized how great it must be to Thomas Vinje (currently the lawyer for the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, but is really more of a professional Microsoft basher). While he often says things with no basis in reality, one bit from a BBC interview really stood out for me today:

Mr Vinje of ESIS says Real Networks’ business was largely destroyed by Microsoft’s action.

"They went from a position of pioneer with a leading market share before the bundling occurred to being, for all economic intents and purposes, forced out of the market," he says.

"That’s despite the fact that all of the objective reviews at that time rated Real’s Real Player product as being substantially better than Microsoft’s Windows Media Player."

First, he has conveniently had the fact that Real Player was not being consistently rated better than Microsoft Media Player, but Real Networks was consistently being caught committing high profile privacy violations, which resulted in a class action lawsuit against the company!  No possibility that had anything to do with some of the market correction on Real Networks share…

Second, and more importantly, Real Networks has certainly not been "for all economic intents and purposes, forced out of the market." In fact, Real recently announced its best financial quarter EVER. Better than when it had 80%+ marketshare!

"We are pleased to again deliver record revenue and solid financial performance this quarter," said Rob Glaser, chairman and CEO of RealNetworks. "We also released a new version of our flagship RealPlayer product to widespread acclaim. The new RealPlayer makes it easy for consumers to download and record video from thousands of Web sites."

Record revenue and a brand new version of a media player…yep, they are totally forced out of the market.

Thomas, if you’re reading this, you should schedule another appointment with the ‘doctor.’