Microsoft Dislikes Nations Trying to Escape Lock-in

Johnny Mnemonic writes "Reuters, link to C|Net, is reporting that Microsoft considers a possible collaboration among three Asian nations to produce their own OS "unfair". You just can't make this stuff up. Shouldn't Asian nations also have the Freedom to Innovate? Or is this merely a dodge by Microsoft to demonstrate that they really do face competition? Will they hire Boies to prosecute their case?"

Comments

Re:Microsoft tantrums

[squiggleslash]

No, I think this is more of an attempt to get State's attention and let them know that MS expects them to come to their aid, via the US Trade Representative.

Or even to provide local benefits.

This looks to me to be similar to what Qualcomm did in their war against GSM. Qualcomm, who are behind the competing IS-95 standard (usually known as "CDMA" though as that's also the name of a technology component used in IS-95.) Qualcomm realised they had an entrenched competitor, and used some rather, er, creative, arguments to portray it GSM as something imposed by governments. GSM was originally created by a group of phone companies of which most were nationalised, so despite being an industry lead standard, Qualcomm could get away with claiming it was "created" by the government. Likewise, the EU, desperate to have at least one mobile phone standard that worked across the continent (virtually none of the different member nation's analogue systems were compatable), told the industry to agree on a standard, and offered in return to open up the 900MHz range in every country to support it. (Individual member nations could open up other frequencies for other standards if they wanted to, but 900MHz would be for whatever standard the industry agree upon.) Again, Qualcomm portrayed this as showing GSM was government imposed.

The campaign had limited success. Qualcomm was able to persuade the US government to lobby countries with nationalised mobile phone systems to choose IS-95. In China they were partially successful, though the IS-95 based system they adopted was substantially modified to be more GSM-like. Qualcomm was even able to persuade a senator to demand the State Department impose IS-95 on US controlled Iraq, though the government didn't buy the argument.

The basic strategy is to make use of modern politician's free market instincts to get them to advocate government and legislative support when they normally wouldn't and when their gut would normally be against it. You do this by twisting what's happening a little, portray the situation as evil foreign "socialists" providing unfair support to an unAmerican technology, and then suggest the American government has to intervene, just to level the playing field.

Microsoft is following in some fairly successful footsteps here, but it also needs to note that the footsteps were used by a company facing an entrenched rival pretty-much from the beginning. The US Government was more inclined to support Qualcomm because it was clearly the underdog, regardless of the technical merits of IS-95 (a mixed bag, CDMA is delightful, the ESN-locked closed AMPS work-a-like nature of conventional IS-95 phones though is less so); Microsoft will have to lobby hard to be seen as the "underdog" in this situation. OTOH, the rival to Microsoft most certainly is Government backed, something GSM really wasn't, at least, not in the way Qualcomm portrayed it.