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MS Faces Hard Sell in EU Antitrust Case
juicy_pants writes "The software giant emerged virtually unscathed in November from an eight-year battle with U.S. federal and state authorities over how its violations of antitrust laws should be rectified. But it may not fare as well in another major antitrust case, now entering its final phase at European Union headquarters in Brussels."
MS will be found guilty and given the biggest fine ever. MS appeal - and the appeal process takes forever - RealPlayer fades away (nobody notices or cares)- Bill Gates donates $100M to fight AIDS in eastern Europe and is lauded as Europe's hero, a selfless white knight whose moral integrity should never be questioned again.
:)
Whoa! Slow down there, Mystic Meg!
I think you're getting a bit ahead of yourself. Sure, the EU beaurocracy is slow, but I think that in this case there may be more effort going into the proceedings. And Real ain't going away anytime soon, either. As for Bill's charitable activities, well good for him, but it won't make him a white knight if the press in Europe have any say in the matter... *grin*
-MT.
Funny, of the EU vs. US disputes in the WTO, US has lost most of them. You won the bananas, I'll give you that.
And what about the steel? US is using illegal tariffs to shield it's lame steel-industry from foreign competition. In Europe we had a wave of consolidation. Lame companies disappeared, healthier companies merger, alot of money was invested in production-facilities. In US that has not happened. You have old and inefficient steel-mills, companies that are stuggling under debt. That is why they can't compete and that is why they went whining to Washington.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I realize this belongs back in the Opera story, but apparently a bunch of people missed this.
Take an old copy of Opera (6.0). Load up www.msn.com in it with the special MS "broken" style sheet. It looks great. Now, Remove the hack that msn.com put in there if it sees "Opera" in the User Agent. (set that -30 to 0 or something). *Poof* Broken looking page.
Yes, if they put a hack like that in there after the release of 7.0 they should have tested again to see if it was still necessary and refined their filter to only catch the known buggy version, but come on guys...
They actually made an effort to make the page look right on something other than IE, AND went so far as to detect a competitor's browser that wasn't rendering the page right (due to a bug in Opera - or at least a very creative interpretation of the HTML spec) and give that browser a style sheet with a workaround in the style sheet.
I agree it caused problems later when Opera 7.0 came out, and they probably should have found/fixed it by now, but I'm betting once the right person hears about it it'll be fixed, if it isn't fixed already.
Microsoft has done some truly crappy things in the past, but this was not one of them.