sodajerk is right, but the fine itself is really a non-issue. Microsoft can easily afford to pay $3 billion. I'm sure that Microsoft is much more concerned about the other sanctions, which are frankly a joke. People hate the Real Player because it's an obtrusive, obnoxious, spam-attracting piece of junk, not because it wasn't included in the OS. The only people left on earth who don't realize this are the people at Real. Otherwise, RealAlternative wouldn't exist. Take away Real and the QuickTime Player, and there are very few competitors to WMP which do not use WMP components under the hood themselves. They certainly don't want WMP to be removed from the OS, because it would break them.
Offering Windows "without" any bits of Media Player at all would be impractical and a support nightmare for OEMs, ISPs, ISVs, corporate help desks, lots of parties other than Microsoft. I'd be interested to see if the EU has formulated a more detailed, technical definition (which you obviously wouldn't see in an Associated Press report). It would be easy to offer Windows without any visible shortcuts to Media Player. It might even be reasonable to offer Windows without the WMP 7-9 executable (wmplayer.exe) but still with WMP 6.4 (mplayer2.exe) and Media Player 5 (mplay32.exe) which have always been "hidden" in XP anyway. Without those, APIs which have been part of Windows since 16-bit days, such as MCI and VFW, would break.
And now that WM9 codecs have become part of a future DVD standard, Microsoft would be justified in including the version 9 codecs even if the version 9 player is excluded.
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