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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 !
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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The deadline is tonight.
The punishment has already been decided
It will take until the 20th to decide if Microsoft's proposal is crappy enough to deserve the fine.
Then they either fine them or they don't.
They've already told Microsoft to piss off when they asked for an extension to this deadline - hell, they've had 6 months to come up with a proposal, now they're just stalling for time.
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
Linux and OS X already come as "reduced-media editions." Nothing forces me to install iTunes on my Powerbook; I can omit it from the installation. Nothing forces me to use Mozilla on a Gentoo machine; I could happily use Lynx.
The problem with Microsoft is that you don't have these choices. There is no WinXP without IE or Windows Media Player. This is what harms competition the most. This is the reason for an anti-trust case.
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?
Of course, they'll be using MS Office to track everything. And then suddenly the files just disappear...
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
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
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.
I am no fan of Microsoft, but I think that they have been unfairly treated in these "anti-trust" cases in Europe and the US. Though I prefer Netscape/Mozilla to IE, I thought the arguments about a browser monopoly were quite foolish.
Have you noticed that the state-of-the-art as far as web pages and web applications are concerned has basically not changed for the last 5 years? Have you ever wondered why all of a sudden the advancement of this field ground to a complete halt? Oh yes, wasn't it just about the time that MS dominated the web browser market by using their OS monopoly to fund development, made IE impossible to uninstall, and incorporated code in the OS to specifically break competitors software. Oh and there was that little something about shipping a default browser to 95% of the planet while intentionally breaking the published standard that they had agreed to adhere to and even helped write.
Since that time the whole field has basically ground to a halt. Developers waste billions of dollars a year coding to standards and then working around all of IE's failures to conform and bugs that they intentionally use to be incompatible. Every web developer I know has cursed Microsoft for their evil behavior and for ruining an entire field all in order to milk a little more money out of everyone.
Antitrust laws exist for several reasons. Mostly it is because a capitalist model fails to work as soon as someone becomes a monopoly. When they do, they can get money without giving customers what they want, have motivation to not only not innovate, but to hold back innovation, and basically just suck money, while doing nothing. The EU is not run by idiots and they are doing the right thing here. The U.S. should have done it long ago but MS was contributing an insane amount of money to both the Democratic and Republican parties. Guess where that money comes from, ultimately from you any time you buy any computer with or without Windows.
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
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz