Microsoft Sues EU

mormop writes "News.com is reporting that Microsoft is hauling the European Commission into court." The case is in response to "imposed sanctions against the software giant, including a record fine of about $621 million (497 million euro) in March 2004, in a case that also covered the bundling of Microsoft's Media Player with Windows, but the company has not entirely carried them out."

Comments

monopolist sues regulatory body

[tota]

what next?

Re:Inflammatory summary

[diegocgteleline.es]

The number of potential security holes is hard to immagine.

Oh, well, stop the FUD. That's what people said when the WHOLE SOURCE CODE of windows 2000 was leaked. And how many holes where found? One. For internet explorer. Which only worked for old versions. Even if you consider that all the holes found affecting windows 2k after that leak are due to the leak, that's a pretty low number for the WHOLE SOURCE CODE. If it's so buggy, where are all those obscure and hidden potential kernel holes, etc etc?

Microsoft CAN write secure code. Just compare IIS 6.0 against apache 2.0 - yes, IIS looks great. They have the money so they can hire the best security people to review the code before going public if they needed it, period.

Bundling is bad?

[wiredlogic]

I don't know why Microsoft is constantly under attack for its bundled applications. Media player has been a part of Windows since 3.1. It has until recently been a simple low-key application but I don't see why MS should be penalized for enhancing their product (love it or not).

The same thing went on when MS included the original MSN client in Win95 and AOL cried foul. Should MS not be allowed to run their own dialup service? Is it wrong for MS to run its revamped MSN websites then? This is something of a moot point since the original MSN sucked and AOL had nothing to worry about.

Then there was the browser bundling debate. Considering that Mosaic and Navigator were being given away for free to all but business users why must MS be berated for giving out a free IE with Windows? IE 1-3 were pretty mediocre and any other company with enough motivation could have out competed them with a better browser and tried to forge a workable business model (however unlikely) or get bought out by MS.

Should MS be punished for bundling TCP/IP when this is a service that could be provided by third party applications?

Then they have their insidious sub-licensed version of the Norton drive defragmenter. Do we just sit back and let them get away with this blatant corporate favoritism? How can another defragmentation company expect to compete against that? Should we even allow MS to sell products that use NTFS since it "unfairly" obsoletes the defregmentation market?

There used to be third party graphical shell replacements for Win3.1 and a few for Win95. Shouldn't we force MS to sell an OS with just the kernel and drivers and no GUI so we can have fair competition in this important marketspace.

Why isn't MS accused of unfairly dominating the plain text editor market by bundling notepad? I say there should be a special EU version of Windows with notepad removed in the interest of fair and balanced competition.