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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.
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.
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'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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.