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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
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.
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.
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.
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podz