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Japanese Government Raids Microsoft Offices
Nakito writes "According to an article at the financial news site Bloomberg, Microsoft's Tokyo office was raided by Japan's Fair Trade Commission, which is investigating whether the world's largest software maker violated the country's anti-monopoly law." Other readers note a AP/Yahoo story claiming: "A commission official, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, said Microsoft Japan is suspected of attaching improper restrictive conditions when signing software deals with Japanese personal computer manufacturers, such as requiring that Japanese companies allow infringement of their patents."
One of the benefits of the new trend towards global companies is that the set of rules one must play by becomes more and more restricted as you enter into new markets.
--- I do not moderate.
When will the governments of the world learn that Microsoft WILL do absolutely anything it can to achieve and maintain market dominance.
Microsoft's objective hasn't changed since day 1: control.
Microsoft would much rather control a broken protocol than use or contribute to an open one.
Microsoft would rather squash or buy out competitors instead of compete on a level playing field.
The only 2 things that can change this behavior are Open Source and government restrictions, in that order. (Increased public awareness and understanding is considered part of Open Source.)
Long live Open Source!
As covered in a previous story here , why couldn't the FBI do that on MS's home turf?
I'm willing to bet the anti-trust trial would have made more headway.
Did anyone even know they had any? Last I checked the Japanese government was all for large overreaching companies.
On November 1998, Japan's Fair Trade Comission has alerted Microsoft to force bundling Word/Excel. It was just alert, but it's raid this time!
Matsushita, JVC, and Sony are Japanese corporations, which the Japanese government is probably very interested in protecting. The large businesses/corporations of Japan have considerable influence in their government, moving beyond petty lobbying towards very strong and well-set puppet strings. It wouldn't surprise me if the raid was taken on in part to protect the interests of a Japanese firm or two.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
I agree, I am ashamed of the double standard the current administration has put on "Bringing Freedom to the world".
More the cause to vote Bush out of office come this November. I will still vote though cause I am in Utah, my states electoral votes are pretty much destined for Dubya as it is!
At least I can add my voice to the growing number of democrats here in Utah. Hopefully too we can rid Utah of that Bastard of a senator Orin Hatch! ;-)
They don't have a problem with large overreaching Japanese companies, that's for sure. But Microsoft comes from America (or Satan-guys, don't post Slashdot after taking cough syrup).
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Then how come they routinely do? Every encounter I've seen or heard of with the BSA has seemed more X-Filesish than like an inquiry by a buisness orginzation. They come in, hold up some important looking papers, and say "Let us audit and then sue you or else we'll sue you, then audit you, then sue you again". I've heard of them taking liscence documents to audit them, then having never have seen them when asked to give them back in the court case. The BSA is Bad News. They're out to make money, the same way Tony Soprano is. At my name not to be disclosed School, yes, school, they required that computer clases be cancled for days at a time while the liscence investigation was going on.
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
Can you give a specific example or two? I'm not saying you're full of shit, but I'd like to look into this if it's true.
Umm, isn't legislating against 'monopolies' a breach of rights (to free trade for instance)? Businesses should be able to do what they want, how the hell do you think the US got to be the richest country in the world? It wasn't just because of a war that happened 50 years ago.
Corporations have become the new scapegoats for our failures as businesses and consumers.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
Misutah Gaytsu. nto ne...Yuu bulingingu eh-to disu-ohnah atto famili da yo. Heeya izu yoah katana ne. Sahbanto no Steebu Balumah wa soon helupingu wizu seppuku.
Yes, most Japanese people have little understanding of English Prepositions and Tenses, which is understandable as they are much more complicated than the Japanese ones...And many Japanese people who speak English usually use little Japanese interjections when they speak, and probably don't even realize they are doing it. At least here in Japan that is what I have seen...
Uhh...am I far enough off topic yet?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
When I interned there my two times I found that being a not top level employee of the company, you are shielded from anything that may be going on, so you don't see, and you just see a happy place that is both fun to work at and be at.
I almost wish whatever was going on at the top level was more pervasive so people knew what was actually going on on a more personal level and make their decisions that way.
That said, I really have no clue what's going on at the top level, I just know if anything is it's all up there, and all the other employees are just trying to produce kick ass products despite what other issues may get in the way.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Let me first say that I don't know Japan's antitrust legislation, but at least here in the US you're absolutely and completely wrong. Monopolies are not, and have never been, illegal.
Where did I say that monopolies are "illegal" in the US? I said that the monopoly is a problem.
In fact, many monopolies are well-supported by governments (think about your cable carrier -- chances are, there's only one in your area, and if you want cable you don't get a choice).
Yes, and those monopolies are usually regulated. Microsoft is not regulated. Regulation of monopolies is one way of reducing their negative effects.
Monopolies only become a problem when they are used to impose consumer-harming conditions.
Yes, like charging too much money or stifling innovation. You know, like what Microsoft id doing.
Your XP Home example is bad, as the price of Windows XP Home is right on par with the price for Windows ME, 95, 98, 3.1, etc.
Yes, and those were way overpriced as well.
thought maybe a sequel to this great book.
"They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier" -dfw
you don't understand... Japanese patents can be and are enforced in japan, it's just American patents that are not.
The American company Micro$hit cannot violate Japanese patents in Japan and expect that the police will not burn their office and publicly humiliate their imployees.
As to anti monopoly laws, "In Japan!?" LOL.
Again, only enforced if the company is American, and harms Japanese companies.
Less look fast, more go fast.
Let's not forget that Microsoft made a huge blunder with the Xbox in Japan.
.... NOPE ....... NOPE ....... NOPE
....that and the Xbox green colour looks like radiation.
Did they get the hardware wrong?
Did they get the marketing wrong?.... NOPE
Did they get the games wrong?
Did they get the price wrong?
So what did they get wrong?
The freakin NAME of the machine.
The letter X in Japan is synonymous with BAD, like an incorrect answer or a cross on a mistake....
and hence the X-box earned it's name as the BATSU-BOX (or the No-Way-BOX)
And THAT was just asking for trouble coming from an American company.
Funny, for a company with loads of cash... Microsoft couldn't even get the cultural sensitivity thing right.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
However my point is that as a company you have to pay attention to more and more rules. If you don't then you end up in a situation like the present one Microsoft finds themselves in.
Except that a company is not an individual. MS Japan is more than likely a separate corporate entity from (and with strong contractual ties to) MS Redmond.
MS India, same thing. It's a different legal entity, with its own charter, etc. with the only stipulation being heavy contractual obligations to the parent company.
If 50 people in Japan can come up with a clear legal strategy in Japan, why couldn't 50 people in Japan come up with a clear legal strategy in Japan with strong contractual ties to Redmond?
This will have zero effect on MS Redmond, but does smear the name of MS even more.
Microsoft is in 200x what IBM was in 197x. In 30 years, maybe MS will be the good guy again, too!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I'm sure a great deal of this legal action against Microsoft is partly "bandwagon" but I also think that perhaps now that folks are seeing that there actually *IS* and alternative to Microsoft, perhaps they can afford to fight back against the things Microsft has been getting away with all these years?
I think the statement is 'Japan's no slacker when it comes to keeping the nation's monopolies in power.' They'll bust little guys all the time, but only to protect the dinosaurs.
a decade or two ago, when japanese productivity was the marvel of the industrialized world and US supremacy seemed in doubt, the documentation to some US-bound japanese VCR's included instructions on how to set the date, using December 7th as the example date.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
...is *extremely* high, once the law decides to go after you. at least for individuals - we'll see what happens to a megacorp.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
None of that "focusing on our core capabilities" crap. Japanese do everything. Look up what say a sony or hitachi or suzuki do. Now compare that to say even a philips. Let alone against american firms.
America has the x-box. Japan has nintendo and playstation AND the foreign devil X-box. Oversimplified example of course but you get the point.
Where in the west we shop at supermarkets wich are really controlled by a handfull of mega corps worldwide the japanese are only slowly shifting to this. Lots of small family owned shops still around.
So MS is in a unique position. Outside old incumbuments like telephone or utitlitie providers there isn't a company that has such a hold on its market. If you produce a pc then you cannot afford to not sell windows with it. And MS is accused of abusing this to force companies to agree to unreasonable terms.
Allegedly. A raid like this shows that either someone overreacted or that the japanese goverment is serious. Japan may have enough monster coorperations to ensure that each on its own is not a monopoly but if you come in from the outside they all band together with the goverment to make something far more difficult to overcome. Just look at the success of foreign companies in japan.
So to answer your question, yes they are but they don't want 1 single companie going out of control let alone a foreign company.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
With OSDN having a Japanese Slashdot you would think there would be a little co-operation here on this story. I guess not. Really, how long would it have taken for Slashdot to correspond with their Japanese counterparts on the phone to come up with a better write-up.
if MS is under monopoly threat in just about every country due to their own actions, the local government needing money, or the local people/government wanting to start their own software industry and need to stop MS?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In Japanese, there's a distinction between "long" and "short" vowel sounds. It's not the same as in English, where the sound changes; in Japanese, long really means long; it's the same sound, just held longer.
They have short and long consonants, too--just like Italian, where "fato" (fate) isn't the same as "fatto" (done) and singing "a cappella" (like they do in chapel) isn't the same thing as singing "a capella" (like a little goat).
Anyway--you can embarrass the heck out of yourself if you don't keep your long and short consonants and vowels straight when speaking Japanese. Jack Seward, in his delightful book Japanese in Action, gives an example of a fellow who went to work for a Japanese firm after WWII. This unfortunate man made just that mistake, and thereby told a group of Japanese visiting the firm that he was his boss's, um, sphincter rather than his boss's assistant.
All the above, of course, is a distraction so that you won't notice that I don't remember just what vowel lengthening is involved with obasan...[pause for some Googling]...ah. There's "obasan" and "obaasan"; this message explains the difference (among other things).
Boeing does this sort of thing already. The planes are assembled in the Seattle area, and the official delivery to customer; papers are signed on board the aircraft over the Pacific. Plane then goes back to the Seattle area, avoiding any sales tax. And since the feature article appeared in the Seattle Times about this, I am sure MS execs are aware that they can avoid US laws off shore.
You folks do realize the reality of the situation, right? This has nothing to do with a monopoly.
Japanese culture makes behind-the-scenes dealings and agreements in america look like childs play. Their corporations LIVE on undercutting the competition by selling below cost to build market share, and the make monolithic groups of hundred of companies banded together to absorb those costs.
This has NOTHING to do with a monopoly. Much as the European Union, Korea, China, and elsewhere had nothing to do with monopolies. You are watching Microsoft's death warrant being signed and you don't even realize it.
Those countries are doing the equivalent of the US FINALLY cracking down on the Japanese car companies that subsidize lower costs through government finance and taxes - telling them to go home. What all these Euro-asian countries are doing is STEALING THEIR HOME MARKETS BACK. They simply can't stand having foreign companies being the driving force in their own economies, and the US government cracking down on Microsoft. If you don't think all the effort the US Government put into tieing up Microsofts finances and hurting their stock priced was HEAVILY lobbied by foreign interests, you're insane.
You're all clapping as one of the few great American money makers is put on life support.
if japanese companies in US/europe can follow the rules there; why it should be a problem for US company in japan ?
actually, why it should be a problem for microsoft in japan ?
The Japanese don't really have a strong awareness of "December 7th" the way people in the US do - It was December 8th for them, when the attack occurred, after all.
Funny story:
Back when I lived in the US, I had a Japanese housemate who was taking flying lessons at a small airfield nearby. Landing the plane one morning, he managed to bump into a couple of planes parked near the runway. It was nothing serious, but since it happened to be December 7th, he was known as "Kamikaze" from then on...
-- My Weblog.
You don't suppose this has anything to do with the new Linux-based joint effort among the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese to create a kanji-friendly operating system? Just wondering. No paranoid conspiracy theory or anything. There *is* a certain element of "getting even" here, though, considering the US shot down a Japanese attempt to sell their own operating system with their computers sold in the US. I don't think we've seen the end of this titanic struggle, by any means.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Microsoft is an operating system and software company. I'm envisioning them morphing into a huge educational services and training organization, that happens to bundle software. You read it here first.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I wonder what their poem would say
Would Truths finally come tumbling out
Like so much blood from just two cuts.
Their lives lost to a business illusion
Heartbeat by heartbeat
Never having seen the sunrise.
Their kishaku's blade hangs on the moment
Was that a tear he saw?
Has the light of Open Source manifested it's beauty?
The blade in motion, a slight turn of the head
The cut through and through
Shamed, the head bounces and rolls.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Actually, I looked around on Wikipedia, and as it turns out, I was wrong about the term Zaibatsu term still being used (it is in American to describe what I was talking about, however).
The real politcal leaders are the heads of the major businesses (ie, Mitsubishi and Fuji etc) and the banks.
Its been known for quite a long time that the Diet is basically a joke and their PM answers to business, not the other way around. I forget what its called, but their trade and industry ministry is where a lot of the real power is, and this raid likely came from there with pressure from the business leaders.
In the past few years, look at what Microsoft's user base has suffered as a result of using their products:
1. Countless viruses - okay, not directly Microsoft's fault but nobody here would agree that MS have done all they could have done to make their products as secure as possible.
2. Licensing changes - costing businesses more.
Okay, so there's nothing new in either of the above except that both the above have had sometimes dramatic reductions on company profits through downtimes and extra IT costs. Add to that the shrinkage in the high-tech industry over the past few years and, all of a sudden, there are a heap of governments out there getting less income from taxation as a result.
On top of that, those same governments are being squeezed to spend less and less on public services and along comes Open Source that suddenly seems to offer a way of cutting down on a lot of the government's IT expenditure.
I know these discussions have been had on /. many times before but this issue in Japan just seems the latest in a long line of governments wanting to simply give, rightly or wrongly, Microsoft "a good kicking" - firstly the DOJ, then Europe, now Japan.
I don't think it matters whether or not MS is a "monopoly" but it is apparent that they could have done a lot more in the past to stop what's happening to them now.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
1) The Harley boom must be resposible for the recent pick up in in the US economy... 2) Yep, the mad cow ban on US beef had no impact on fast food beef bowl resturants in japan. Anyway, even if they had sold imported US beef, it was far too expensive for the average consumer at $3 a bowl, compared to the usual $6-$9 paid for a meal. Don't the Americans wonder if maybe they consumed a just a bit less of their inexpensive and quaility agricultural products, they wouldn't be such f*cking lard asses, by world standards? But really, WTF does any of this have to do with a very light on details article on an investigation of Microsoft, in Japan?
Except they normally show up accompanied by armed federal marshals.
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http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.ph
http://global.bsa.org/southafrica/press/newsrel
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/news/colum
http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/01
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Yes, Microsoft is breaking your Anti-Trust laws. It doesn't matter what your laws are; MS is breaking them.
No, you won't do anything about it. It doesn't matter what you think or believe; there's too much riding on MS for you to seriously combat them. The revolution will not be mandated.
- The Amazina Llama
If you choose to sue a code contributor for patent infringement, I believe you lose all right to use the software. Of course, Mozilla is not a monopoly, yet.