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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."
After reading through the article, I didn't find much in the way of information. What specifically was the problem here? Microsoft still bundling? What are they being accused of bundling this time?
In a truly competitive market that would be the case. The desktop and office suite markets are very far from that though. Intel have survived having to share their IP with AMD, why can't Microsoft do the same with their competitors instead of erecting artificial barriers in order to soak their customers and prevent any effective competition from emerging.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
..just slap them on the hand and force them to seed 2 billion dollars into a market they don't dominate...that'll teach em!
I know you are trolling but this is so often repeated that it deserves an answer.
IANAL, but I have followed a number of antitrust cases. Courts are very hesitant to forceably break up a company and rightly so. In general, the emphasis is on long-term corrections rather than creating instability as a result of such a breakup.
Such a strategy takes time to have an effect, but it is often, I think, more effective than merely breaking up companies. The stifling restrictions that AT&T lived under for decades eventually lead to their divestiture (this was largely voluntary), and the restrictions that IBM lived under cost them their market power. But it doesn't happen immediately.
The slap on the wrist along with a court finding is actually one of the worst things you can do in an antitrust suit to a company. The reason is something called "collateral estoppel" which basically holds that absent a change in fact, facts which were necessarily decided as part of one case cannot be relitigated in another. So leaving the company intact while finding them to be guilty of Sherman Act violations lowers the bar to everyone else. Ralph Nader point out that it would take an army or lawyers to enforce such action against Microsoft, but he fails to note that in this case, Microsoft is now facing hundreds of antitrust suits, each of which is now far more dangerous simply because of the portions of the finding of fact that were not overturned by the appeals court. So Microsoft is heavily stifled by this judgement. Had they been broken up, they could rightly argue that facts had changed, but now they are in big trouble.
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Back when VCR's (video cassette recorders) were just out, there were two competing formats. One of these was Betamax. Technically, it was superior. However Sony wanted large license fees from those companies that wanted to produce products that used this format. The competing technology, VHS, had licensing terms that were considerably more reasonable for those interested in producing VCRs.
So while dozens of companies bought licenses to produce VCRs using the VHS format, only three or four companies made VCRs that used the Betamax tape. Naturally VHS came to dominate the market.
So here we have, in essence, an example of a superior product(Betamax) that was not successful. This happens all the time. It's the best marketed product that wins, not necessarily the product that uses the best technology.
In Europe Microsoft has different contracts with businesses preventing them from using other software.
For instance: to become some kind a MS-partner you have to have at least 30% of your staff and 50% of your sales people have some kind of MS Certification. The total share of your servers/clients that has to be Windows 70%. Next to that, if a MCS... can convince management to replace a Linux server by a Windows server they can get a bonus from MS up to 1000 Euro/server.
IF you can or will not comply your company will have to pay all licenses in full until 2 years back
To the people that don't believe me: I worked in such a company with such a contract. I told one of the customers that Microsoft wasn't his best choice for the technical needs he had (big customer, lots of servers) and I almost got fired because some big shot from Microsoft got to hear about it and demanded my release or they would revoke the license advantages. If you complain to the authorities same Bad Things(tm) will happen
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