Microsoft Leaves U.N. Standards Group

pk2000 writes "Microsoft withdrew from a United Nations software standards group for commerce. 'Unfortunately, for now, we have made the decision to stop participating in U.N./Cefact for business reasons and this serves as notification of our immediate withdrawal from all U.N./Cefact activities.' This might be connected to Microsoft's intention to build up its patent portfolio. Currently it has about 5,000 patents and seeks to at least double this number by the end of 2005."

Comments

One can only hope

[Anonymous Coward]

One can only hope that MS' refusal to adhere to real standards will backfire. I just hope that corporations and governments aren't to dumb to realize that it is them who have to pay the prize for MS' tactics.

On the other hand, once patent laws are the way MS and others want them to be world wide open standards will simply not matter anymore. What a bright future lies ahead for freedom of information and freedom of choice...

They win

[tuxlove]

With this many patents, Microsoft will win. Their intent is to kill all competition/freeware by patenting everything remotely interesting to them. They don't even put their name on any of their patents until they issue, so it's really hard to spot them. There's no telling exactly how many, or which patents they have in process at any time, unless you do a lot of educated snooping at the USPTO. And that tells you nothing about their international patents. Their pulling out of the organization will have little impact for them.

It would appear to be Microsoft vs. The Rest of IT

[msobkow]

In this corner, we have Microsoft with a platform-specific lockin solution designed to drain business revenue without actually committing to fix reported problems.

In the other corner, we have IBM, Sun, HP, Novell, RedHat, Mandrake, Oracle, Sybase, and a few thousand other vendors supporting full POSIX stacks, international and national standards, and essentially working on the philosophy of building from a shared technology foundation.

While Microsoft may have bought their way out of court-imposed penalties by delaying the case until a change of government occured, they can't buy their way out of the opinions and mistrust they've built for the past 2-3 decades.

As they've refused to compete on quality, reliability, security, and performance of business solutions, what choice does Microsoft have except to try to use the courts and barratry to survive?

After all, they can't accept (or perhaps can't grasp) a service/quality based market. Their whole mindset is package and sell, not long-term services and support that generate stable revenue instead of bursts during purchase/upgrade cycles.

Business hates upgrades. A minor patch for an existing release means much lower retraining and deployment costs.

Consumers love upgrades, they get a whole bunch of new gadgets, features, toys, and shiny icons.

It's simple: Microsoft can service one market or the other, but not both. Any attempts to use their IP portfolio for barratry are likely to get them pimp-slapped by the vendors I mentioned above: they don't like Microsoft's intrusions on their turf any more than Microsoft want's Linux on the desktop.

Someone needs to be able to overrule patents..

[Dogers]

Companies that join working groups should be forced to say "right, these are my patents, i'll share with you and if i pull out, i cant use them against you".

If Microsoft start patenting things the group is working at making, waiting until the standard is out to start suing (Hi, my names Rambus, id like to help you with your DDR tech!), or perhaps even joined, had a look what the groups doing, realises they have patents that covers it then pulls out.. ooh, i'll be angry! :/

Re:mod parent up

[gowen]

working on universal standards for OS interopolbility because that is a buisness killing move and against the very reason buisness competition even exists in the first place.

Nonsense. You can have interoperability and standards. Consider, say, the power sockets in your house. In every country there is a well defined standard for plugs (sure, we'd like it to be the same for each, but thats not important) and everyone's plugs fit that socket.

There's still competition. Some make robust, expensive plugs for important equipment that can't afford to fail. Some make cheap plugs for budget consumer kit. Some make plugs with groovy features like circuit breakers and easy fuse access. They compete with one another, and yet none feel the need to breach the standard for how a plug should interact with the socket.

Here goes my karma

[violet16]

It's very rarely in the interests of a dominant entity to engage with a group like the UN. Whether you're talking about international law and the United States, or IT standards and Microsoft, you have the group wanting everyone to play by the same rules and the dominant player wanting to leverage its advantages.

Doesn't mean that Microsoft (or the US) is bad; that's just logical behavior for an entity in a dominant position.

Now I've just drawn a comparison between the US and Microsoft, so I know my karma's shot to hell.