Software Makers Lobby EU Against Microsoft

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Adobe and Symantec are lobbying EU regulators for action against Vista, the Wall Street Journal reports. Adobe is calling for Microsoft to be barred from building into the OS free software that competes with Acrobat. From the article: 'Adobe and Symantec have told EU regulators that Vista has put them squarely in Microsoft's cross hairs. Symantec is concerned that Vista will direct consumers toward a Microsoft-designed security console, or box that shows what level various security functions, such as an Internet firewall, are set on. The rival company wants to be able automatically to override the Microsoft template with its own design and features, as it has been allowed to do in the past.'"

Comments

Microsoft is doing the right thing

[lukas84]

Actually, i'm with microsoft on this one.

Symantecs OS invading suite of crappy tools just sucks.
Integrating PDF generation into applications and office suites ist also a MUST.

Microsoft is doing the right thing here. And i won't whine for symantec, they just made all the veritas products more sucky.

Re:Microsoft is doing the right thing

[Antique Geekmeister]

Whine for them or not, Microsoft has a long history of putting in poor-man's versions of commercial tools to undercut competitors in ways that are illegal for such a monopoly to do. Symantec and Adobe just got handed the same deal that Netscape did, and the authors of the commercial TCP stacks for Windows 3.x.produ

Andn as far as PDF conversion goes, it's been free as part of PDFcreator for ages. Adobe's commercial versions are in fact more fragile, bulkier, produce less reliable PDF, and have a terrible tendency to stuff your system with "features" that you never asked for. The free PDFcreator, riding on top of Ghostscript's history of robustness and reliability rather than pursuing "business plans" that break features, has been outperforming it in automatic print services for years.

DOJ is doing nothing so you need the EU

[EmbeddedJanitor]

It seems crazy that a dispute between two US companies is being settled due to EU law. The US has very similar laws in this area, yet the DOJ has proven that they are doing nothing useful about curbing MS.