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EU Deadline Approaching for Microsoft
doga writes "As reported by various publications, Microsoft is facing its deadline tonight at midnight central European time. The commissioner has then to decide whether it implemented correctly the measures (windows without media player and interop documentation) or if it should be fined up to 5% of its daily sales." From the article: "European antitrust regulators, who have been at odds with Microsoft over its efforts to comply with its order, hope to make a decision by July 20 as to whether Microsoft has submitted an acceptable proposal for compliance, said Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for the European Union. That date is the last meeting of the European Commission before its summer recess."
Bill Gates: "Ooh, the Germans are mad at me? I'm so scared! Oooh, the Germans!"
(ok, shamelessly stolen from The Simpsons)
The owls are not what they seem
Expect France to vote "Yes" on this one !
The deadline expires tonight.
Then, it will take a few weeks to decide on a punishment (if any).
Then a few more weeks to decide if the decision is the right one.
Then another month to decide if the decision of the decision was a good one.
Then submit it for a committee vote.
Wait - who had the decision?
I thought you had it? Where did it go?
What were we deciding upon?
I don't know. Let's hold a meeting and see if we can decide on it.
What's for lunch?
I don't know you - you decide.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
How about free market extremists with no idea of the economic terms "deadweight loss", "externality", or "market failure" and why they are bad things to have going on in your economy. Can I hate them instead?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Because in Europe, there are laws again anti-competitive measures (like bundling WMP or IE) used by companies having a monopoly or a REALLY good hold of the market?
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
There's no real doubt that Microsoft will submit a proposal, however, given their previous efforts, it's likely to be another "Well we'll do *bits* of what you asked and charge people for it" proposal.
20 days from now means something like $100,000,000 in retroactive fines even *if* Microsoft then immediately handed in an acceptable new proposal on the same day.
And I'm still not sure if they've actually paid the ~500 million Euro fine that was imposed originally.
Saw this image earlier and got a good laugh.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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This is blatently unfair to Microsoft; an obvious exploitation of a wealthy corporation by governments. This is made obvious by the EU's 5% daily sales fine.
Here we go again, the free-market zealots who don't care that the assumptions of a free market are secured. Yawn, indeed. Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Unfortunately, by the time you've got a gun to your head, its a little late to do much about it.
I'm guessing you don't believe that a company that is sufficiently large can ask the government to hold the gun? See oil companies/clothing companies in many countries.
> Last I check Microsoft was not pointing a gun at your head, and telling you to buy their crap.
No, but they are pointing market dominance at PC manufacturers' heads, thus limiting my freedom to select my hardware supplier and OS supplier seperately.
If the invisible hand really worked that well, it'd probably be making sure monopolies didn't exist, not giving uneducated folks like you handjobs in return for drooling praise.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Every distro I've tried had tones of stuff bundled with it. How should this be considered? Same as IE/WMP in Windows? Hopefully not... here are my two reasons:
1. Any other OS does not have a monopoly - different rules apply (or, to be precise - antimonopolistic rules don't apply).
2. All that extra stuff in Linux is not integrated with OS (for example AFAIR you can't uninstall IE).
What do you think? Has this problem been mentioned/discussed somewhere?
Sorry but your friend working on Longhorn is hardly unbiased isn't he? So there are things that MS won't budge on heh? Well they are about to get the lesson in sovereign nations. I doubt very much that MS will take their ball and go home and right off a market of 400 million people.
Thalasar
People brushing these things off always seem to ignore or forget the fact that trustbuilding is illegal. You don't think the government should be limiting abuse of markets, or taking steps to halt anticompetitive behavior, or busting trusts? Fine. The proper thing to do then would be complain to the lawmakers, and try to get the law changed. The proper thing to do would not be to whine about the poor abused multibillion dollar monopolies when people decide, hey, we're going to start actually considering enforcing the laws on the books now.
Microsoft was been unfairly treated? How so? How were they "treated" at all? In the Netscape case the government found them guilty and then walked away without doing one damn thing to them. How often does that happen? Looks to me like they got the treatment of royalty.
Though I prefer Netscape/Mozilla to IE, I thought the arguments about a browser monopoly were quite foolish.
And the fact that the browser with 90%ish market share has been able to effectively halt work on and adoption spread of open standards such as CSS2 or SVG is just a coincidence? As is the way that the messy derailing of Java as an application platform immediately followed that same browser/os company all but by their own hand preventing the widespread adoption of versions past the very primitive 1.1 or so?
This is blatently unfair to Microsoft; an obvious exploitation of a wealthy corporation by governments. This is made obvious by the EU's 5% daily sales fine.
If that was what the EU was after, they'd have implemented the fine at violation, rather than as an absolute absolute last resort after over a year of deliberation, delay, pussyfooting, and giving Microsoft chance after chance to comply with the law.
Considering Microsoft tried to destroy the Web.
IE would have stopped talking to Apache and slowly broke the web. This was their strategy.
IE talking to IIS servers on WinOS only, think of the insane liscensing costs of even a small server farm.
The Web is worth nillions, 5% of M$ daily sales is chump change considering the loss to Commerce Worldwide.
Now of course Governments shouldn't stick their noses in, but the courts should and did when a monopoly behaves illegally just like for any other crime - it is a legal matter and was pursued as such.
This is why Netscape went Open Source, because Microsoft was buying the web and Netscape realised its server business, where the money was, would be over when IE had blanket coverage and Netscape couldn't afford the developers to fight back.
Microsoft commited a crime, they broke the law and they still are, they should be punished and the punishment should fit the crime - it is pretty small ion fact, as evidenced by Microsoft completely ignoring it.
If only America had the balls to follow suit they might be brought to heel, if not break 'em up, just like Ma Bell.
Massive monopolies do not a healthy market economy make.
Microsoft's business model depends entirely on the idea of denying its potential competitors funding in order to prevent their future viability. If the EU became a "No MS zone" by Microsoft's own choice, that would be more than enough funding to support a viable competitor, hell, to support any number of viable competitors. Those viable competitors would then inevitably wind up selling in the U.S., and unable to deny them a market-- because it would no longer be able to impact the market in which they are rooted, in the EU, in any way-- Microsoft would have to compete on the merits of their own product, something they can't and don't do.
Microsoft wouldn't pull out of the EU. The money they'd lose by pulling out of the EU would of course be effectively irrelivant; Microsoft has money to burn. But the control they'd lose by pulling out of the EU would be, to Microsoft, unacceptable.
Linux and Apple do not hold monopolies on their markets, so even if they wanted to, they can't break the relevant laws. The findings in the US and Europe were that M$ has broken those laws, and even a casual familiarity with their business practices would hardly leave anyone in doubt!
If M$ won't respect the law, they should be penalised. Of course, I'd rather see them penalised by a total market boycott, but that probably assumes an unrealistic level of common sense from their customers and potential customers...
you had me at #!
Meanwhile, the bottom would drop out of MSFT stock, as every single product line has it's potential sales slashed by the the number of sales they would have had in Europe. Profits would turn to losses. And the end result of that could only be company directors losing their jobs. Bye bye Ballmer.
I'm sure MS employees like to talk the talk, but the company certainly can't walk the walk. Not on this one.
No, you really don't get it. Microsoft has managed to wedge themselves into the PC market, mainly through vendor lock-in strategies like proprietary file formats for things people depend on. It's damned difficult for PC vendors to not deliver PCs installed with microsoft, because understandably some percentage of a PC vendor's customers will want microsoft installed, but unless the vendor agrees to ship _ALL_ PCs with microsoft installed, microsoft threatens to pull the vendors license to ship microsoft. If the vendor gets their license pulled, they lose a lot of business. What would be fair is if microsoft just let the vendor decide which OS they want to ship for which proportion of their PCs. Microsoft is pointing a gun at the PC vendors heads and telling them what to sell.
There are plenty of people and companies today who really want to switch away from microsoft for very legitimate and understandable reasons, like the constant barrage of security holes, increasingly agressive licensing policies, etc., but they can't because they are locked in by the formats on the documents which they have invested so much time and effort into.
Microsoft is a bully to everyone it deals with, and it's time that the bully is dealt with by those who have the power to do it.
--
podz
4) The status of Linux gaming hasn't suffered as a consequence of Microsoft's tactics garnering it a near monopoly
Linux gaming? You might have a valid point with the other ideas but this one is like saying nintendo is making mac gaming impossible... It's not that fact that MS is trying to monopolize desktop gaming, it's the fact that linux isn't really much of a gaming OS and doesn't have much of a desktop presence. It's market share and not MS that keeps Linux from having many games.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
those rat bastards will find a way to pass the costs onto the consumer.
You sir, have no idea how right you are. Basically, whenever a tax is levvied, the supply curve (how much product a producer produces) shifts up and left the tax amount. (See first few diagrams on this page)
When you have a monopoly position (like MS does), that demand curve (the "\" curve) gets more and more verticval because you kinda need MS prods to survive. Thus that "Deadweight Loss" to consumers, not to MS, is much higer than that of MS.
Sucks balls, huh?
Hah hah hah hah hah.
:)
They'll probably have to drop the more pompous bits of the constitution, but considering most countries will have backed it - they'll go ahead with it regardless.
France will either re-vote on the the same or amended constitution, with "opt outs" negotiated/agred by the govt. Failing that - the French govt. will allow most of the constitution stuff to happen at EU level regardless.
The same goes for the other countries who vote no - except the UK - which will require insane dancing and manoeuvring by both the EU and UK govt. Either that or everything re: UK will fall apart.
To some extent the disappointment show after the French vote was merely PR. The show (with preplanned amendments/surrupticiousness) will go on.
Oh - plus the EU may shelve some of the political stuff, and concentrate on economic stuff again - working on precisely the free-market stuff that the French No camp (on the left anyways) accused the constitution of enshrining (despite the No camp in the UK thinking the opposite
All in all, it's merely a bump in the road. I don't necessarily view the EU's undemocratic nature as a bad thing as long as we continue to elect the govts. who run it. (And they do run it, despite them saying the EU is to blame for this/that - it's all their own work).
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
" Europe has no right to levy a fine of that magnitude on an American company."
Why not? When MS decided to start selling their products in the EU, they knew the laws here. If they wanted to be held accountable by US laws only, they should sell in the US only.
I a Russian firm for example operates in the US, are they not bound by your laws?
There is no trade-war, these laws existed when trade agreements with the US where drawn up.
BTW, you do know the MS is a convited monopolist in the US too?