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Microsoft To Be Fined E500M By European Union?
An anonymous reader writes "According to a Reuters story, the European Commission is in the process of fining Microsoft 497 million Euros ($613 million). The most important reason for the fine was the refusal by Microsoft to share more information about its products with competitors. Mario Monti, the EU competition commissioner, decided to impose the fine after talks with Microsoft broke down last week." The last estimate was a mere 100 million Euros, and it's noted: "If the full European Commission backs the fine as expected on Wednesday it would exceed the 462 million euro penalty imposed on Hoffman-La Roche AG in 2001 for being ringleader of a vitamin cartel."
Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of your enemies like being "the ringleader of a vitamin cartel." :)
What is E500M in Windows 98SE licenses?
From the article:
The fine amounts to slightly more than one percent of Microsoft's roughly $53 billion cash on hand and did not impress analysts and critics.
"This is a traffic ticket for Microsoft," said Thomas Vinje of Clifford Chance, who represents Microsoft critics.
Neil Macehiter, an analyst with London-based technology research firm Ovum, said even a $3 billion fine would have been "an irritant to Microsoft but certainly wouldn't break the bank."
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
My crystal ball says Bill and Steve better pay soon, before that 500 euros is worth an even Billion dollars. :)
The article says that the major reason for the fines is Microsoft's refusal to license information to competitors to ensure compatibility.
In other words, the actual software that these laws protects is horrible stuff like RealOne and Quicktime. Open source projects can't afford to license things. I'll be even more impressed than I already am if Mplayer and the like can continue their higher quality in the face of such crappy capitalistic laws.
When are governments going to get a clue? Screw fines - almost no amount of money you can take from them will really have an effect on their behavior or the market. What the EU ought to do is to tell MS that if they want to do future business in Europe, they need to make the Office file formats an EMCA standard, and that any patents they have on the formats must be licenesed royalty-free. That would create real change and competition in the market - let them compete on implementation, as it ought to be!
The Free desktop that Just Works
The current ruling could set a useful precedent... with someone finally having the guts to intervene against illegal abuse of monopolies, Microsoft may finally have to pay for the damage it has done to the software industry and users
Yes. I beleive that would be a first for this administration- correctly guessing who has them.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
- All your BMW and Mercedes cars
- The jet engines from your aircraft (invented by Sir Frank Whittle in Britain in 1945)
- All your nuclear weapons and X-Ray machines (since radioactivity was discovered by the French Marie Curie in the 19th century)
- The ideas that the Wright Brothers stole from Leonardo Da Vinci (Italian)
By return of post, we will send back:
- Macdonalds
- All our Hoover vacuum cleaners (since we now have the much superior British Dyson vacuum cleaners)
- "Charmed", "Smallville" & "Dawson's Creek" (however, we'd like to keep a copy of "The Simpsons" just to remember you guys by!)
Ciao, toodle pip and au revoir.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Well, I keep hearing talks about Microsoft being a monopoly and needing to be punished. But, what I want to know is what are they actually being punished for.
For being a monopoly. Or rather, using their monopoly position to leverage themselves against competitors.
Spending millions of dollars to develop IE which was then distributed free with Windows pushed Netscape out of the browser business fast.
Now they're trying to do the same with AIM, Real, iTunes, well, you name it!
Doing that kind of stuff is not legal in the USA, nor is it legal in any western country. And for good reason: Monopoly practices are bad for everybody except the monopolist.
It's damaging to the economy. It's damaging for consumers.
Or to put it another way: Capitalism is it's own worst enemy.
(and that was pretty much agreed upon until certain politicans realized that big businesses had bigger pockets for campaign spending)
You're joking, right? Could you imagine the panic that would ensue if Microsoft tanked in one night? My god, it would be like the apocalypse hit Wall Street.
The economy is not all about good products and services being dealt at a fair price. In fact, it's 99% about confidence that that's what's happening. And an AWFUL lot of people are confident that that is what Microsoft is doing. If that confidence was suddenly undermined, the ensuing whirlpool could take an awful lot down the drain before things got back under control. Microsoft needs to be brought down to size the way IBM was - competition needs to wittle it down slowly to the point where it's size and market power reflect the quality and value of its offerings. A sudden disastrous strike taking it out could have horrible consequences.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
The US military budget is greater than the next ten largest military budgets combined.
:o)
Yeah, but those other ten countries aren't stupid enough to pay $600 for toilet seats.
I highly doubt that the US could win an all out war with the EU without annihilating the entire world in the process. So, it's not likely that we'll be invading Europe any time soon.
Yes, only an idiot would do that, right?
Oh, wait...
In the nuclear age, having the most powerful military in the world is like being the best boxer in a gunfight.
Had the EU (such as it was) approached Microsoft ten or fiteen years ago, and said: "We'll let you engage in anti-competitve practices in operating sytems, office applications, web browsers, and media players all you like for a crisp half-billion dollars, payable on delivery", do you think they would have taken the deal?
They have $50 Billion dollars in cash. 1% of one's cash reserves (never mind revenues) is simply not a punishment.
Imagine being taxed one percent of your life savings for a license to break all the laws you like. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.
The problem with fines is that business already thinks in terms of money. Punishments for breaking the law are intended to deter behaviour. Fines are instead framed by the company as just the cost of doing business.
Agreed that 500-600 million is nothing for Microsoft, but what IF they took the money and used it to fund FLOSS. Assume the govts weasel 50% off the top! That leaves 250-300 million for FLOSS.
:) ]
This is where the real damage to MS could occur, if the penalty cash is dished out to the right FLOSS projects that threatens MS directly.
Proposed split based on what I think would help FLOSS and hurt MS:
50million for the Linux Kernel to get their security certifications finished for govt usage, driver improvements to the kernel, SE-Linux integration, whatever else Linus wants
50million for Apache Webserver, Tomcat, and other Apache-based projects that really eat into IIS market share
25million for OpenOffice with a focus on compatibility with MS Office.
25million for GNOME & KDE, split evenly on whatever they want, but with a preference on creating a Win2k-style desktop emulator so the riff-raff can change their screensavers like before
10million for plug-ins/features into Eclipse IDE that help emulate the best features of Visual Studio, and better integration of non-Java languages like Perl, PHP, C#/Mono, etc
10million on Bitkeeper replacement and/or Subversion to get great source code control mgmt, tied into Eclipse IDE enhancements above
10million on modeling tools for code or databases like SQL Navigator, or Rational Rose
10million for PHP on whatever they think they need
10million for Wine to get us closer to running lots of apps on non-MS Operating systems
10Million for ***BSD Flavors [Just because they have created so much with so little
10million for RMS and GNU with the promise he wont complain about everyone else's cash allotment
AND
25million for an investment fund that donates 50% of the yearly profits as grants to future promising FLOSS projects
There are still some definite similarities between the two leaders.
They were both first elected in dubious circumstances with less than majority support. They both support imprisonment without trial (one for terrorism, the other for communism). They are both strongly homophobic. They both pushed tighter regulations onto foriegners than natives, despite the fact that crime could come from either (think airport fingerprint checks, despite the fact there are terrorists already in America). Worried yet?
The US military budget is greater than the next ten largest military budgets combined.
CORRECTION: Once you include the cost for Iraq, the US military budget is greater than all the worlds military budgets combined. The USA=$399 Billion plus the $75 to $100 billion in Iraq is to be determined; versus the rest of the world with at $463 billion.
Kind of funny when people have a major discussion on history where they personalize the complicated actions of groups comprising millions of people into simple "us" and "you" terms. Even more amusing when both sides try to convince eachother that the other is wrong, even though they each cannot change the historical facts. Looking at those facts though, neither side is that innocent anyway.
Even if so-and-so did something really wrong decades ago, how does that apply to any of us living today anyway? Most Americans disagree on tons of issues... and the same applies to Europeans. Generalizing the will of either "side" into what dumb politicians say is unfair to both.
How about we just talk about our common interests like computers instead of showing too much misplaced nationalistic pride?
I plan to plan / Dutch course in The Hague