EC Reviews New Complaints Against Microsoft

Rob tells us that while Microsoft may still be fighting against existing antitrust sanctions the European Commission is already reviewing new complaints made against the software giant. From the article: "European Commission spokesperson, Jonathan Todd, confirmed that the competition commission is considering the complaints but said that no decision has been taken on a course of action, adding that the commission does not have to wait for formal complaints to take action against a company it suspects of anti-competitive behavior."

Comments

Re:Helping competitors

[Vegard]

Well, it can still be "better" in itself, as in having more features, better features and be more stable. And it will all be irrelevant if it isn't near 100% compatible with the monopolist. This is the reason OpenOffice has to spend time and effort chasing Microsoft all the time.

If Microsoft could again make a super-proprietary format that only they could read, and not having regulation in one form or another stopping them, it would probably make sense, economically. And this is the reason it is important to preserve free competition in the market, to regulate the monopolists. If you can't do that, someone could end up "owning" the market without anyone being able to realistically make a dent in their market.

That's not really free competition either.

Re:nothing new to see here... move along...

[The Famous Brett Wat]

I thought they just wanted the specifications for these protocols published...

Microsoft is not known for having complete and accurate documentation of any of its APIs or file formats. If you want the absolute truth, you go to the source code. Think about it: if there were a discrepancy between what the documentation says, and what the code does, which one do you think will be considered "in error" in most cases?

It's rare that "specifications" are considered authoritative over "implementation" -- more common that "specifications" are written retroactively based on the implementation when people realise that the source code is an unreadable mess, but they still need to know what it does at a glance.