Microsoft: The Next Investigations

Runt-Abu writes: "Some of the UK's top companies (and some of the not-so-top as well but hey...) are questioning Microsoft's policy on pricing. In an open letter to the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry several of the top companies voiced concern at the cost of an extra £880m over a typical four-year investment cycle. No one from Microsoft has commented at this time, given the current state of affairs it's highly likely many companies will not upgrade or seek alternative cheaper solutions." Basically, a large trade group is asking the British Office of Fair Trading (akin to the FTC in the U.S.) to investigate Microsoft's price increases. And Gogl writes: "It appears the attorneys general of 6 more states have voiced concern over Microsoft, particularly regarding the upcoming release of Windows XP. Microsoft and their allies claim that AOL-Time Warner was behind this, which AOL of course denies," pointing also to this piece on Microsoft's changing licensing costs.

Comments

Re:The prices really do keep going up.

[stubear]

Onec again...you do NOT have to register. You DO have to activate the product. Both are completely seperate processes but only activation is necessary and only requires the user to input the WPA code. No personal information is sent along with this code. You could even choose to register your software as a completely fictional character if you chose and Windows XP would work just fine.

Re:Microsoft is fully in it's right

[Masem]

With MS now legally declared as a monopoly, they no longer have the right to set whatever price they want for their product, because a monopoly suggests that there are no market forces in place that will cause a supply-demand-like effect to take place. (Again, it's not illegal to hold a monopoly, only to abuse it's position). It's expected that the next legal phase of the MS/DOJ will include looking at the licensing costs; if it is determined that at the current costs, MS is earning more than a reasonable profit per copy sold, someone's going to have hell to pay.