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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."
Not enough cowbell.
same old, same old... Microsoft upsetting people again...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
EC Rendered Impotent Due to Constant Examination of Microsoft.
EC Contemplates Name Change To Microsoft Review Committee.
if the EC did force M$ to embrace interoperability. it would be a boon for open source, and other software companies wanting to not get stomped on with each new rev of OS/application suite.
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?
The kleptocrats can't quite afford their new mansions and yauchts. They're looking for large, rich businesses to help them out.
"confirmed that the competition commission is considering the complaints" I can barely say that out loud, let alone imagine how Microsofts attorneys are going to understand it said with a British Accent.
The European Commission do seem to keep pluggin on this. However, I was under the impression that their first ruling was supposed to have put this to rest.
I know they already issued a financial punishment to Microsoft (which Microsoft could undoubtedly afford) but seeing as this has 'come back' again, you'd think they would arrange a punishment which would actually hurt Microsoft - to persuad them to Be Good(tm)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
These complaints come as no surprise, according to inside sources.
Go, and never darken my towels again! -- Rufus
.... that an microsoft antitrust article features a ginormous ad for Windows XP
Unfortunately a better product doesn't alway guarantee success.
. . . blah blah blah, blah, blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah,blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah, blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah.
[How do you say "blah" in French or German?]
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
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?
No, they have the hurdle of compatability (an ever moving target) before they can even compete.
Product A (lets call it office) Is real nice, but expensive.
Product B (lets call it open/star office) is pretty good, but free/cheap.
Product C (lets call it santa's magic office suite, because it doesn't really exist) is better than both other products and free/cheap
If company X has all of there stuff in product A's proprietary format B and C can be irrelavent even though they are valid/better options, that is not competition for the best product, it is momentum of living on past success.
The problem is the small/medium guy needs Office compatability at a 99.5% level to work smoothly with the big guys who need it at a 100% level because of legacy apps and docs.
right now product B is around 90% compatable (can share information, but presentatin may be different), but that is not good enough in a lot of places.
The dominance in Office is used to slow adaption of Linux, by keeping a proprietary changing format. Also, MS was forced to make Office Mac if I am not mistaken, but would probably be hard pressed to stop since OSX users are in the unenviable position of having less good choices for non-MS office suites than Linux users.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
A "better product" is both successful (ie. popular) and technologically up to date.
The owls are not what they seem
Are they are looking to fill a hole in their budget here?
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
A better product is one that fills needs faster, cheaper, easier, etc. But sadly people doesn't see that. They usually want something beacuse they saw it on tv or ads. That is why marketing is so important, it doesn't matter if your product is the best of all. If it's not well marketed then it have a low possibility of succed.
..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.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
.....move the chairs out of Ballmer's office.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Looks like if this goes through then Open Source Software and Microsoft will be on a level playing field when it comes to interoperability.
Could things like the Windows Media format and network API nightmares could be a thing of the past on Linux and FreeBSD?
Come to think of it, will this mean that Microsoft's evil 'Direct Play' API will become an open spec? If so then this will good news for game porters the world over.
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.
Clearly, you haven't used any of the "better products" you're touting.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't AMD license -- and pay for -- the use of Intel technologies?
What, exactly, was Intel forced to share?
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.
Also, MS was forced to make Office Mac if I am not mistaken, but would probably be hard pressed to stop since OSX users are in the unenviable position of having less good choices for non-MS office suites than Linux users.
/more/ choices, since I can also choose products specifically meant for the Mac (such as Appleworks, which also came preinstalled on the machine but which I haven't used yet).
I just got my first Mac ever to replace a PC laptop that had gone kaput. It came with 'Microsoft Office for the Mac TESTDRIVE' which is a 30 day preview of the Microsoft product. They didn't even really integrate it into OS X. They also charge $400 for the standard edition, while the Windows version standard edition is $322 (via Amazon.com)
In order to edit Word documents, I've downloaded and installed NeoOffice, which is an OpenOffice.org port using Carbon and Java (you can also get regular flavored OpenOffice for the Mac). So far (1 week) it works just fine.
What I don't understand is your belief that OSX users have fewer choices than Linux users. OSX can run pretty much anything *nix runs, since its built on top of [FreeBSD?] (BTW, I can drop down to command line any day of the week and geek it up to my heart's desire). I'd argue I actually have
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
(The Beatles)
Please don't fool yourself - the combined countries of the EU are a much bigger economic power than the US and it's bad laws by foolish Eurocrats that are the only things stopping that unity working as well as it should. Even so, any US company that ignores the EU does so at its own peril.
Sorry, but if you want to trade in a country or region then you play by its rules, end of story.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
...and get some business hammocks. I hear there are a few places for that on third.
Read the rest of this comment...
OK here goes:
/. is that NeoOffice is based on an old version of OO.o and has stability problems.
1) X11 though good on Linux is not so on OSX, negating the every (Open Source) Linux app runs on OSX (regards to good choice).
2) My understanding from
So that leaves you with Apply works (which was teh suck when I last used it but that was version 5).
PS Do you study anything? Student Office is $150.00 for 3 computer pack. I don't know the details of the EULA (not required to know anymore than the obvious) so they may use a finer definition of student, but to me downloading and looking at educational powerpoints is me using Office to study. Therefore I have the educational copy on three computers I use (I do not use it commecially though).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The EU is part of the operating system.
[Insert pithy quote here]
"Microsoft still bundling? What are they being accused of bundling this time?"
Notepad?
Vote for Pedro
"The Pope? How many divisions does he have?"
Fuck Slashdot
I got a better idea. Replace the chairs with these ergonomic, impact-proof models!
I'm sure that's precisely how it went.
Please stop giving the rest of us Americans a bad name with your drivel.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
FTA: "Ms Kroes [EC Competition Commissioner] has declared herself "determined" that open source developers should have access to the information, and Microsoft appealed to the Court of First Instance recently to get a legal decision on whether it should be required to share communications source code with open source software vendors."
This is about whether or not MS meets interoperability standards mandated by the EC as part of the last action against MS.
It seems crystal-clear to me: Either the standards are open, and therefore fully interoperable, or they're not.
For MS to say that their standards fulfill interoperability requirements, without allowing anyone (especially the Open Source community) to see those standards, is complete hogwash.
"the two sides still cannot agree on whether interoperability information should be made available to open source software suppliers"
The two sides? One is a private corporation, the other is a government entity. There is only one side with legal authority, and MS had better be prepared to shape up when their appeal result comes next year.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I agree. We need to add a "Module -1 (Notepad)" to ease people into things.
As long as MS office software is the market leader in numbers, why the heck would you want to use anything else to prepare people for working with computers? Keep your GPL religious bigotry out of it, and realise that it's a way of preparing people for a real job in a real company using computers - and for 90% of people that will mean MS office.
Train them up on Abiword, lynx, Linux xyz, and whatever 'pure' FOOS software and all you're doing is shafting them out of what they thought they were paying for - knowledge that will help them get on in the current office environment.
"the combined countries of the EU are a much bigger economic power than the US and it's bad laws by foolish Eurocrats that are the only things stopping that unity working as well as it should."
Your phrasing is more than a bit off -- how about 'the combined economies of EU member-states, if they operated coherently, would be more powerful than the US economy.'
Just because something is larger does not make it more powerful -- power is the ability to wield that size.
Also, the size and power of the European economy has little to do with this issue -- it's the size of the market for a particular product. The market, and the threat of denying access to it, is the only weapon the EC can use to influence MS's activities.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"Since when does anyone give a crap about MS source code... I thought they just wanted the specifications for these protocols published in a free (beer and speech) manner?"
I do!
I could finally write good quality and secure code from the masters.
http://saveie6.com/
I hate to say this, buddy, but there are cities in the US with huge unemployment areas, your education system is suffering & while you have good quality healthcare, no-one on a minimum wage can afford it. So I think we cancel each other out on those bits...
We need cash, lets rape the Americans; they only gave us electricity, phones, internet, cars, planes.
Yes, quite possibly. But the longbow (a weapon that, like the aircraft, revolutionised warfare) was a French invention (I believe), the jet engine was British, Airbus will trounce Boeing & you handed over your car industry to the Japanese, just like we did. Oh, and let's not forget that what brought the Internet out of the realm of academics into the eyes of the general public was the World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee who was *BRITISH*.
Oh and gratitude, screw it, who cares that they lost 10,000s, of 10,000s of young men bailing us out of two world wars last century, we don't like Bush now.
Erm, what about the equal numbers of European young men who died in those same wars??? And Australians, Japanese, etc. etc.??? Or were their sacrifices any less just because they weren't American? I find your statement offensive & ignorant....
Gratitude, that's not trendy, "evil Americans" is.
I've nothing against most American people - hell, I was in the US when 9/11 happened & I wept for the dead as much as any of the US citizens around me did. However, whilst most governments are just plain corrupt, the Bush administration is *EVIL* & your politicians are nothing but puppets to the corporate lobbyists. That's why anything that stops your evil corporations in their tracks is a *good* thing for the rest of the world.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
How about I queue alongside US farmers because I'll end up getting two handouts? One from US government subsidies so that I can produce "artificially cheap" foodstuffs & the other from the combined efforts of McDonald's & KFC to destroy the face of agriculture purely to make cheaper junk food...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
But what I do object to are my taxes filling Microsoft's coffers because the health service, social services, libraries, schools, etc. have not been forced to evaluate and use free software first before spending *my* money on Windows, Office, etc. I'd much rather my taxes paid for, say, a new dialysis machine than 500 copies of Office....
Added to that, if Microsoft is happy for people to train on their products via government initiatives, then Microsoft should also support & subsidise training on virus detection, spyware removal & Windows fault-finding because those three are equally prevalent to anyone who uses a Microsoft product.
Or how about someone forces Microsoft to pay me for the time I've spent rebuilding the PCs of friends & family with an operating system that I have absolutely no faith in...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I would say with a 50% larger population compared to the US the market for products that are needed by almost every office worker should be a lot larger than the one in the US even if the companies employing these workers might not generate the same profit as the US.
Linux is not Windows
According to this artical, the specification is worthless:s ofts_eu_concession/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/19/why_micro
Quote from artical:
"The source code itself is the specification . The level of detail required to interoperate successfully is simply not documentable - it would produce a stack of paper so high you might as well publish the source code."
However, they also say:
"There is information that the Samba developers want to see: the IDL descriptions for remote procedure calls. These underpin tasks such as adding users, and adding quotas and shares, and Samba developers have successfully decoded them over the wire. But it's hard work.
"These IDL descriptions are *key* for providing interoperability with Microsoft clients," wrote the team in a submission to the EU commissioners earlier this year. "If these IDL descriptions were published, open and equal interoperability with Microsoft products would be greatly enhanced (although still not perfect)."
Allison says the Samba team has requested the IDL definitions from Microsoft annually, most recently at the 2001 CIFS conference, without success."
``Intel have survived having to share their IP with AMD, why can't Microsoft do the same with their competitors''
I can think of at least one reason:
Because the cost of duplicating software is infinitesemal, whereas the cost of manufacturing microchips is substantial.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So either they give up their source code, and endlessly whine about nasty governments "forcing them to give up their crown jewels," or else hand over a buggy spec, and risk having a court find that they failed to comply with a court order.
No doubt, they would do the latter, and try to argue that buggy specs is standard industry practice, and drag it out forever.
They licenced the tech in order to avoid anti-trust investigation and the consumer has benefitted a great deal. Microsoft decided to waste their time fighting a battle they couldn't win and the consumer has had to put up with all sorts of malware and bugs until they finally got their act together with XP SP2. Had they licensed Win32 and Office formats we would have all benefitted from the increased competition instead we're still stuck with the incompetent monolith.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Thus the drive by MS to push DRM'd proprietary formats with illegal tying to other proprietary tools, all protected by the DMCA/EUCD, EEA and sw patents. Then the US will enforce MS' will.
How many times do we have to hear this crap. Beta wasn't supperior, you needed to tapes for one movie- each tape held about an hour. How is this technically superior. It stored a few extra scan lines, for very little discernible different from VHS.
Indeed. It's a subtle straw-man.
"They want the barest minimum information on how our products talk to each other so they can ensure interoperability"
is a lot more reasonable-sounding than
"They want the actual source code of our products" (implied: so they can rip-off our hard-created intellectual property).
Frankly nobody I know would want to touch MS source code, apart from possibly virus/worm writers. Everyone else'd rather see the access and comms protocols and write their own implementations. Ones that, y'know, work.
Unfortunately, this distinction is lost on many non-technical types, and Microsoft and its lawyers have hardly been correcting people when they make the mistakes, since it's to their advantage to have it presented this way.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
I've seen this argument posted all over the place, but this is the first time I've realized that, contrary to this wisdom, VHS was actually the better product... to the VCR manufacturers.
Ugh, not this historical reconstruction again. This is going to sound like flaimbait, but since I actually lived through the Betamax period here goes the truth:
Technically, the original Betamax tapes could only record about 60 to 90 minutes. It took more than one tape to record a TV movie or to copy from a commercial tape. Copying was popular because of the incredibly high prices of commercially released tapes. Knowing "the guy" at the video rental really paid off in those days. The high equipment costs meant you often cribbed the videos off the local video-rental dealer (these were the days before Blockbuster, and before Macrovision crap) for the price of a rental + a blank tape, and he had enough equipment laying about to do it. Big movie releases (over 90 minutes) meant more tapes had to be bought and needed more man-handling to copy them. Anyone with a library of tapes in the early 1980's had shelves full of these "homemade" releases, not the commercial tapes.
VHS, with its bigger cartridge and longer tape, was able to record two full hours which made it much nicer for prime-time TV recording and pirating videos. It was also nicer for rentals, where you didn't need to change tapes in the middle of the movie [a side note, this was also a setback for 12-inch LaserDiscs which required disc-flipping]. Not that it was a huge deal, nor that many movies ran long enough to require Betamax double-tapes, but it was one detail which made BetaMax seem inferior to VHS. It was quite a few years before typical Hollywood releases ran over the two-hour mark that VHS handled easily.
Sony may have wanted large licensing fees, but Betamax had a big headstart in video releases. And for years every movie had a Betamax and VHS release. I think people just got tired of the double-tape movie releases. And when Betamax finally came out with 2-hour tapes, VHS countered with T-160 tapes. Once again, piracy is what drove the marketplace. I fully believe VHS 'won' more because of the early two-hour capacity than anything else.
{ - Generic Guy - }
The EU commissioner for competition, Neelie Kroes, is a very contreversial figure in Europe. She was revieing cases of companies that she was working for only a few months before, has a habit of sticking her nose into everything, and not always complying to behavior codes she accepted when taking on the position.
Last year she even got a University she used to work for to give Bill Gates an honory doctorate.
I wouldn't be surprised if the whole process slowed to a halt because of her.
Erm, what about the equal numbers of European young men who died in those same wars??? And Australians, Japanese, etc. etc.??? Or were their sacrifices any less just because they weren't American? I find your statement offensive & ignorant....
Actually, never mind any of that. The Russians won the war and the Russians suffered the casualties. They lost millions of people, more than all other allies together. 3/4 of the Germans' losses were on the eastern front. Where the hell is the gratitude to the Russians?
(See the Economist from April or so when the V-Day celebrations were on for the details)
Logi - I can do anything, but not everything.