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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."
Should we expect eminent post of the Japanese version of Windows XP source code now?
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Just shocking. Never saw that coming *at all*.
"IT Department of Japanese Government Raided by BSA"
Wow i hope they make a Anime about the raid!... .. Giant Robots!!
Officer: Stop!
M$: no!
Officer: So, Be it.. we must Kungfoo Figh!...
Then out of no where
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.
You imply that just because one country has restrictive (or just different) laws and regulations, that a company must play by these same rules in all other markets. This is just simply not true.
I'm sure MS has enough lawyers to sort out the regulations from one country to the next and is completely capable of playing by more than one set of rules!
I've made up my mind and now I've got to lie in it.
What happened to the good old days when we had RIAA and SCO jokes to space out the Microsoft ones?
It is absolutely ridiculous that our rights (to free trade in this instance) in the United States are treated so lightly by our government.
At every opportunity it seems the president is reinforcing "his commitment to spreading freedom throughout the world" yet it takes a foreign power to ultimately prove how hollow that sentiment is.
When compared against Europe and Japan, the United States commitment to protecting its citizenry from overbearing coorperate powers is shown lacking time and again. I for one an tired of the hypocrisy.
Its shameful that I have to look to another country with hope that something will be done to curb the monopolistic amoral appetite of these coorperations.
For now I can only say "go Japan!". I'm embarrased by the entire predicament.
Yeah, shame they didn't think about doing this in December. God, that would have been great.
A couple of years ago, the Bank of Japan's Washington, DC office scheduled their annual holiday party on December 7th and sent out invitations before realizing that they had invited economists from every nation to a bash on Pearl Harbor Day.
Needless to say, Greenspan did not attend.
The United States couldn't finish the Microsoft case during the Clinton administration, but it may be the Japanese that cause Microsoft to adopt tactics conducive to competition.
They gave us anime, lots of neat consumer electronics, and Microsoft a slap upside the head. Japan gets two thumbs up from me.
May we never see th
Perhaps the problem is with large overreaching foreign companies?
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. --Dan Kaminsky
It might not have happened if MS were Japanese company?
I hope they show a Japanese official on C-Span trying to pronounce "Ballmer"
You said:
and that was what I was challenging. Just because MS is (potentially) found to be a monopoly in Japan does not mean that they will be found to be a monopoly in some other country or that they will change their behavior when penetrating new markets based on any such ruling.
I've made up my mind and now I've got to lie in it.
Actually I'm the president of a company that has used open source profitably for over 5 years, and it does pay the bills. Very nicely in fact.
Thanks goes to the developers of Linux, Apache, MySQL (and other databases), PHP, and others.
And yes, I want my company to make money, which it does. But there are more important things than that, and there are plenty of profitable companies (open source or otherwise) to prove that money can be made hand over fist without resorting to Microsofts tactics.
Are you kidding me? They're getting away with it because it's a foriegn company. Japanese corporations get away with things we'd never dream of in this country. They have no trouble with overreaching corporations as long as they're there own. Japanese trade policy has always seen Japanese Companies and government working hand in hand to pry open foreign markets by every means nessecary, and the nature of the complaints has Japanese coporate complaint all over them.
Why?
While I've worked for MS before and may again I always find their street address rather funny/ironic.
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
As a former resident of Japan, I think this whole issue is being framed the wrong way. Monopolies are part & parcel of Japanese business practices. It's more likely, they didn't pay off the right officials, plus they happen to be a foreign company.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Summerizing this Japanese article, the issue is that the OEM contracts contain a clause disallowing the filing of complaints about against Microsoft software. The main part that seems to have rankled is that Microsoft is believed to have improperly included software developed by Japanese manufactures(Fujitsu, NEC, etc). By being forced to agree to the clause in the contract however, they are unable to file a complaint against Microsoft.
This is where the monopoly bit comes in. Because Microsoft has an OS monopoly the makers have no other choice than to include the OS on their machines, which in order to do so forces them into sign the contract. All of which rubs up against various Japansese antitrust and trade laws.
Remember The Madness of King George a few years back? The original title was The Madness of King George III but they thought that American audiences would want to know where parts I and II were playing at...
(ducks)
See it here.
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.
No. But I have helped prepare the paperwork for a successful patent filing in Japan. The difference between the US and Japan is that you cannot patent bollocks. In this particular case 8 patents for the US ended up being 4 patents in EU and only 1 in Japan.
First: their patent office has not yet degenerated into an approval stamp machine so the patents have to have merit.
Second: they charge an arm and a leg for a patent filing so even large corporations avoid defencive patenting and stuff that has no commercial value is not patented at all.
I usually get flamed by the idealists which still believe in the "small inventor", but I will say it again. This is the way a patent system is supposed to work. A patent is a government guarantee to the inventor that he/she will be capable to exploit the commercial merits of his/her invention. Note the words commercial. So with all due respect I do not see any merits in trying to patent an invention of no commercial merit.
The side effect of this is that the US method of IPR development is reversed. For Japan you first find financial backers for the idea and then patent it.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/