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

interesting. best of luck!

[ministerofsickeningr]

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.

Re:Helping competitors

[deaddrunk]

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.

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

[Karzz1]

I found this particular paragraph interesting:

"Ms Kroes 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."

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?

For people not in the EU..

[guruevi]

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