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Microsoft Hands Over Docs To EU
hankwang writes "Reuters reports that Microsoft has handed over technical documents to the EU in order to enable the competition to make interoperable software. So far, the EU has imposed fines of €497 M and €280 M onto Microsoft for abuse of its monopoly. The deadline for this documentation was today. According to Microsoft, the documentation is over 8500 pages."
497... no presents for Bill's kids this Xmas...
fines of E497 and E280 is off by 6 orders of magnitude. Should be E497M and E280M.
does anyone know where to actually get the specs?
They gave ".doc" documents, don't they ? ;)
-- Rastignac was here.
Is it to be made publically available or do you have to request it from the commission?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
That would be "so far, the EU has imposed fines of 497 MILLION and 280 MILLION onto Microsoft". Of course, it's still spare change for Microsoft.
Well, the value of the dollar has been slipping recently compared to the euro...
According to Microsoft, the documentation is over 8500 pages.
Microsoft were then fined another 5 Million Euros for photocopying and stapling charges because the EU needed more copies...
Summation 2
Competition: update on Microsoft's compliance with March 2004 Decision (23 Nov 2006)
Reduce, reuse, cycle
The question still remains...Are these documents up to date? Or if they are at the time they were handed over, will they remain up to date in a perpetual manner? Microsoft could submit "up to date" documents and later change interoperability metrics of what these docs represent. They have done something similar before.
*sigh*
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. The EU has judged Microsoft to be abusing a monopoly position in the global european market. That's a big no-no for the EU Commission, since the whole "European" idea is based on free circulation of goods, people and financial instruments. In other words, the EU is against monopolies and large companies locking customers in their line of products and services. Is that so hard to understand?
To counter-balance this monopoly position, the EU has asked Microsoft to supply its competitors -- including many European companies -- with the necessary documentation. That documentation was required to open Microsoft files (.WMV, for instance) and communicate with machines running Windows system (SMB protocol). Microsoft refused and was fined a lot of money. Microsoft said it was going to comply, then delivered the required documentation. End of story.
As far as I know, havin inter-operability between Microsoft products and competitors is a Good Thing(tm). You can thank the EU for that.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
...in Office 2007 format, forcing the commission to buy a licence to read them?
:)
Oh, that'd be so funny.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
"These are not the docs we are looking for"
</stormtrooper_voice>
'This page intentionally left blank.'
``fines of € 497 and € 280''
Look, I don't know what they teach kids in schools these days, but just because a lone 0 is nothing doesn't mean you can just go and leave out zeroes whenever you like.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
the lack of software pattents in the EU
All work and no play makes Steve a dull boy. All work and no play makes Steve a dull boy. All work and no play makes Steve a dull boy...
The only thing that makes me feel uneasy about this whole thing is the necessity for government intervention.
It would seem that things like this, in a free market, should take care of themselves...
Other companies can't create compatible software, thus Microsoft should somehow feel that burden and suffer somehow. I guess that hasn't happened..
But when the government has to intervene in ways like this, it reminds me a little too much of Reardon being forced to hand over the recipe for his metal alloy (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand). It seems wrong, somehow, that Microsoft should be forced to give up their secret sauce. Believe me, I am no Microsoft fan, but I would have thought that the market should take care of this kind of problem itself. It should have been, somehow, in MS's interests to allow other companies to interoperate with their own. For example, "the more people we can work with, the more we'll sell our operating system." Why has this not happened?
I guess that's what being a "monopoly" is then -- when it's no longer in your self-interests to "play nice" with others.
Does the analogy with Reardon Metal, or McDonalds Secret Sauce, end when you realize that software is inherently different than a physical substance? If so, why is that? How is it different?
Indeed. Requiring Microsoft to submit this documentation, while helpful, isn't a full solution to the root problem. The root problem is that Microsoft implements proprietary formats, protocols, and APIs in the first place, and that so many people rely on these.
IMO, it would be better to mandate the use of open standards inside the EU government. This is (1) less heavy-handed than imposing a fine, (2) ensures the details of formats, protocols and APIs used by the EU are publicly available, (3) allows anyone to implement these formats, protocols, and APIs, and (4) requires anyone who wants to sell software to the EU to support them. It also gives parties other than the government the option to use these open standards, or proprietary alternatives, as they see fit.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Will the documents be usable outside the EU? The EU may allow Mac and Linux developers documentation, but that documentation may have the status of trade secret in the US.
I presume the EU will just fine Microsoft more for stifling competition if they tried to pull a stunt like that.
Microsoft's not a monopoly: you're perfectly free to create your own standard (as the OO crowd is trying to do). Surely you'll admit that it's not Microsoft's fault that such standards aren't catching on?
Personally I don't use OO because I can't swap files with people with whom I co-author scientific articles. MS Office and Open Office equations STILL don't work right (and before you LaTeX fanatics step in, neither of us speak that language).
Since I get my MS Office for free, why should I even consider OO?
The owls are not what they seem
I believe the truth is that the Euro has been more worth than the U.S. Dollar for most of its existence and certainly since July 2002. At its introduction in 1999, the euro was traded at US$1.18. It declined and rose again. Over the last 365 days it has been worth an average 1.25 Dollars - never falling below 1.1697 since Dec 2005.
The rules are different when you are a monopoly.
Everyone seems to forget that they were found to be a Monopoly in both EU and US.
On the European side, they were found to be illegally abusing their monopolistic powers.
On the US side, basically a few people sued them and nothing really big came from it. (Of course this is the summary and you can go read all the archives regarding this long ordeal.)
So yes, when some raging abuse of a corporation has grown out of control... the government steps in and evens things out a little bit.
Well, there is the unenlightened summary of why monopolies can be beaten with a stick and it's alright.
(It's turkey day, I'll leave it to someone else to go into a discussion about the benefits of interoperability and monopolistic standards.)
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Anyone have a link to the torrent?
Well, there's just one fatal flaw to your argument. Microsoft has been found to be a monopoly. It has also been found that Microsoft has abused its monopoly position.
Given Microsoft's history of denial, avoidance, and outright dishonesty, stating "Microsoft said it was going to comply, then delivered the required documentation. End of story." strikes me as a little naive.
I believe that before this story ends we will have to judge the quality and accuracy of the documentation as well as Microsoft's willingness to keep it up to date.
http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/antitrust/cas es/index/by_nr_76.html#i38_381
For those of you asking how to get the documents: they're not available free of charge. Microsoft has handed over documents for checking, and has explained how it wants to license them.
The EU is going to decide three things: whether the documents satisfy their requirements, whether the price is reasonable (based on Microsoft's original contribution instead of their monopoly position), and whether the proposed license is reasonable.
If they decide this will do, then Microsoft has to make the documentation available for people wanting to buy it under those license terms for that price; if they decide against, then Microsoft still hasn't complied and will get more fines.
It never was about documentation available without strings attached, that would be too unreasonable.
See the Washington Post: The Commission's decision, it recalled, required Microsoft to "disclose and license complete and accurate interface documentation [...] and Microsoft could face further fines if the Commission finds that the price was based on Microsoft's exercise of monopoly power, rather than on the originality of its product.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
What it means is that your illusion of the free market is broken, simply. If you start out with a market with no restrictions at all, you will most likely get a few companies that are immensely powerful. These companies will use their power to keep others out, thus creating a non-free market.
Morale: The free market is at best an unstable and short-lived artifact. Besides, I don't think anybody actually want a *free* market - what most want is a *fair* marketplace; one where everybody has equal opportunities, so that if you are clever and hardworking, you can achieve financial success. But this requires some sort of regulation - ie. government intervention in most cases. Legislation is, after all, a form of government intervention.
Apart from that, the EU Commission is not a government of a country - the EU is not a state or nation in any sense. It is 'a supranational and intergovernmental union of 25 independent, democratic member states' - to quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU
Explain to me again how a completely unfettered free market prevents the formation of monopolies? I think I missed that part of economics. A free market permits monopolies, but does not necessarily regard that to be a bad thing.
Also, there is no difference between software, a secret sauce or a fictional metal alloy so your analogy holds true; none are physical objects, all are IP.
It's not just big companies, this monopoly poroblem. I remember on my most recent trip to Europe, I tried to pay for something with fake money from a board game. I was arrested and charged with abusing my Monopoly...
My sentence was to be sent to jail, sent directly to jail, not to pass go, not to collect 200Million...
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
It could be argued that the US antitrust case was over-ambitious: the EU's proposed remedy attacks the same thing (Microsoft's vertical advantage in owning OS, application and media layers) in a more sensible fashion. By enforcing interoperability they enable exactly the kind of competition the Ayn Rand weenies believe the free market should give them.
> And why should nation states and courts get involved in making other products work with
> Microsoft's?
Because Microsoft are leveraging the effective monopoly they have in the OS and office markets to make their protocols and file formats de-facto standards, then withholding documentation in order to stop competitors from being able to use these, now standard, protocols.
> Microsoft's not a monopoly: you're perfectly free to create your own standard (as the OO
> crowd is trying to do). Surely you'll admit that it's not Microsoft's fault that such
> standards aren't catching on?
Yes they are and yes it is. Courts in both the US and the EU have found Microsoft to be a monopoly. Furthermore courts in both the EU and the US have found Microsoft to be illegally using it's monopoly status to lock-out competitors by either polluting existing standards ('embrace and extend' as it's known)(HTML, Java etc) or create proprietary standards and then consistently attempt to make it difficult for other software to be compatible (.doc, SMB, WMV etc).
> Personally I don't use OO because I can't swap files with people with whom I co-author
> scientific articles. MS Office and Open Office equations STILL don't work right (and before
> you LaTeX fanatics step in, neither of us speak that language).
All the more reason to document the file format properly and allow the applications to compete on merit and price then don't you think?
> Since I get my MS Office for free, why should I even consider OO?
I didn't notice anyone say you should. But if I can't use OO because you use Office simply because Microsoft is deliberately obfuscating their file format is that fair either?
Heh, I had a compulsory business economics lecture this morning -- ooh lookey, a chance to show off my mad economikz skillz.
In a normal competitive or semi-competitive market, firms try to maximise their profit by following the supply and demand curve. The cost for a firm to enter or leave a market is negligible, and consumers will always go for the best product at the lowest price (i.e. the optimal price/quality point). This is the optimal sort of market from almost everyones' point of view the best product will always win, and it turns out that this is a really good thing for the economy.
Let's assume that to start off with, the market for audio player software is a perfect competitive market. All media files are stored in an easy to implement format (e.g. MP3 or WAV) and so one audio player can easily be replaced by another.
Now, Microsoft decides to enter the market. They realise that they can get a huge install base by bundling their audio software with their operating system (which is more or less a monopoly product). This is an attempt to gain a monopoly in one market by leveraging a monopoly in another, which is illegal in some places such as the USA and EU. They then decide to reduce the contestability of the market by making their audio software default to creating files which competing firms' software cannot read without a license from Microsoft.
There are many more examles of Microsoft doing (or attempting to do) this.
All involve deliberate breakage of interoperability and backwards compatibility by either undocumented protocols/file formats or perversion of existing standards for them.
Pirate Party UK
- no single producer is powerful enough to have a decisive influence on the market (i.e. no monopoly!)
- no customer likewise
- only one product is traded in unrestricted quantities, and every producer provides the same quality at the same production cost
- every producer can enter and leave the market freely, which means: you can immediately start selling without having to invest into infrastructure etc.
- I think there was a fifth precondition but I forgot what it was, sorry...
It is generally assumed that only one product fits these rules approximately, namely petrol (or gas, if you like), but even this is debatable.If any of these preconditions is missing, you don't have a free market! Most business people forget this fact.
So, don't expect the market to take care of eventually solving all economical problems. Sometimes it does by chance, but actually there is no guarantee.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
Is 8500 pages really that much? I remember that in July, when MS protested against the fines, they said that 300 employees had been working for over a year with writing the documentation. This makes 8500/(300*12)=2.4 pages per employee and month, which means that I'd really like to have that job..
Free markets aren't a magical solution to all economic problems. Ayn Rand thought they were, but such thinking is naive at best, and ignorant at worst. There are a number of logical thought experiments, such as the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons effect that demonstrate the inefficiencies and problems inherent in free markets.
I seriously and strenuously doubt that this 8500 pages constitutes the purported documentation. Far more likely it is a masterwork of corporate techno-drivel. I expect to hear from independent qualified judges that this material is not, in fact, necessary and sufficient information to enable an expert to create a system capable of reliably interacting with M$ machines on a network. Likewise with file formats, &etc. This present waste of paper is nothing more than yet another chess move by M$. The EU will have to burn months deciphering and testing the documents, more months filing reports on how extrmely bogus it actually is. The EU bureaucracy machine will piss away many more months spinning up. M$ will whine and wail to the press about how the oppressive socialist regime is never satisfied no matter how many earnest efforts poor little M$ makes to comply with the the horrible old EU's draconian and anti-competitive rules. Neelie Kroes will impose more very impressive sounding, but ultimately trivial fines on M$. The EU will decree that M$ can not distribute software in their constituent countries. M$ will instantly appeal. An automatic injunction will take effect, nullifying the decree. The decree was, after all, nothing but hollow posturing from the get go. M$ will pay the fines -- which have been for years factored into the cost of doing business in the EU. M$ accountants will treat the whole matter as a simple, standard, albeit largish, bribe. The wheels on the bus will go round and round. Macchielvelli's rotten, grinning corpse will cum in it's shorts again. Same Old Shit. Repeat after me: M$ will NEVER give up their wire protocols, APIS, ABIs, or file formats. Ever. Not until doing so presents itself as the most profitable course of action. At present, such a disclosure would be nothing short of financially catastrophic for them. Complying with the EU's demands is quite out of the question. So forget about it. Now. Do it.
Well those few companies only ensure their pre-eminence by changing the rules in their favour - software patents, extending copyrights, the introduction of licences to practice or manufacture etc. that are too high cost for new players to get, etc. Essentially, the free market model can work, if it remains free. One example of how that happens is by laws which prevent monopolies from abusing their power, such as in this case.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I and many others in the EU would like to see such a thing too. Unfortunately that is just a utopian ideal at the moment.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
So, when a private person or company gets to a certain arbitrary size in terms of assets, then the government is allowed to use force to take property from them? That sounds soooo enlightened.
Yup, pretty much.
If I were running Microsoft, I would stop all shipments of all products to Europe (which is within their rights), and vigorously prosecute all copyright infrigment. That'll teach the government to mess with private property.
Good idea. I'm sure Microsoft is really keen on losing on the biggest single market for its software! And everybody would have to use alternative operating systems and office productivity software, essentially killing the MS lock-in once and for all - why didn't they think of that brilliant plan! You should be running Microsoft.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
What a company has a monopoly on one area, they can use that to give them an unfair advantage on other areas. This has been strategy used for every single successful MS product launch since MS DOS.
Demanding that a company with a monopoly publish the interfaces so competitors gets equal access means that competition again becomes possible.
Free = no regulations
Perfect = perfect competition, perfect information, perfect mobility
The "free" market is just a theory, and idea, an abstraction. Governments exist to facilitate trade and if regulations facilitate trade, then regulations you shall have.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
First of all, noone got taken to court for just being big. Maybe you don't make that confusion, but a lot of (other) people seem to think that anti-trust somehow means "punished for being big" or "punished for being successful." That's not the case. Coca-Cola is still perfectly on the safe side of the law, for example. And noone orders McDonald to give the recipe to its secret sauce.
The thing sorta goes like this:
1. It must be proven that you've actually abused your might in a non-lawful way, and there was an actual harm to the consumers. (Harm to competing companies actually doesn't matter.)
If you will, it's like taking the school bully to court. He's not tried or punished for being big, he's tried for punching people in the face. There's a not-so-subtle difference there.
2. It must be proven that you were in a monopoly position, in which it was artifficially unfeasible for someone else to undo the harm you did. I.e., that in that situation, the free market just didn't work.
Basically that's the reality check to your Ayn Rand-inspired musings. If it can be proven that the free market can neutralize the harm on its own, then the company _doesn't_ get the legal equivalent of a kick in the nuts.
E.g., if two pharmacies aggree to fix prices on vitamins, it's _not_ an anti-trust case. The market can work around such minor speedbumps. People will just go buy their vitamins at the super-market, or go to the other pharmacy down the road. Or maybe someone will open their own pharmacy across the road. But when (as has at least once happened) the major pharma companies fix prices, that may well be an anti-trust case.
Look... noone is against the notion of a free market. We quite like it in Europe too. We don't go asking companies for their secrets just for the heck of it, but only when there's no other recourse left to force an aberrant situation back to being a free market.
The free market is actually a lot less robust on its own than some libertarians seem to assume. The whole notion and theory is centred around some assumptions: there are many identical/interchangeable products, the buyers are perfectly informed, it's trivial for a new competitor to enter that market, etc. _That_ situation can balance itself all right. But the whole mechanism falls apart when those pre-conditions aren't true any more. There are some actions and some kinds of damage that it can't work around, and there are people who have the financial interest to try to do just that: destroy that ideal free market.
And that's the other thing: the assumption that it's in everyone's interest to play nice, is false. It's in society's interest that they play nice, but for the individual competitors it's most often the exact opposite: you make more money if you can get in a situation where you don't have to play nice.
E.g., as a simple example, if there are two smiths in the same medieval town, sure, it's in everyone else's interest that they start acting like in a free market and undercut each other's prices. But those two smiths can make more money if, say, they make a secret aggreement to fix prices. Then they're the only supplier in town and can fleece everyone else with impunity. Or maybe one of them will decide that instead of even that, he'll hire a couple of mercenaries to beat the other up. Or whatever.
So to make a long story short: expecting the free market to always just work on its own, is a bit like expecting a city to work without a police station. Sooner or later someone will have the means and the incentive to ruin all that for everyone else.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
.... they have put off getting fined by the EU for a couple of months. It's a stall tactic plain and simple. Criminal defense lawyers do it all the time.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Huh? The complaint that led to this came from... Sun Microsystems. Not from some EU goon or even an european company. And can you show any bias in how the EU has given preferential treatment to european companies compared to US ones when it comes to anti-competition judgements? All lists I have seen are firmly dominated by EU companies. If you can show me any factual background I might change my mind... if not then I can only look at your statement as an Bill O'Reilly type rant.
At the time I wrote this you had been modded insightful... why any reasonable modder would do that I don't know.
> If people don't like MS, just don't buy its software.
We can't, our external partners send us and expect to receive data in proprietary MS formats.
I understand that you live in your moms basement, and thus have no need to exchange data with other people, but some of us live in the real world and our only choices are 1) to use MS software, or 2) to use 100% compatible software.
Requiring MS to publish specifications is a way to ensure that #2 remain at least theoretically possible.
What EU is doing is what any government should do, to keep the market alive is the finest reason for governments.
And no, because you are unable to imagine any other reason than petty protectionism for an action does not mean it is irrational. There is another option. At least you choosed the proper subject for your message.
is a huge Word .doc
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
You know, it would be nice if all the "it's like some stupid kind of import tax" or "it's punishing US companies" people actually bothered to read the way it all went before posting crap.
First of all, MS was initially _not_ fined a single dime. They were ordered to release the docs for certain protocols needed for interoperability. (I.e., no, not to document all of Windows. Dunno what gave you _that_ idea.) It was even allowed to give a list of which independent experts are qualified to judge whether the docs are enough or not. And the commission picked one of them. Pay attention, because it's important: it was someone suggested by MS judging these docs all the time.
That's it. The original ruling had _no_ punitive aspect as such. It was aimed strictly at correcting the monopoly situation that made it possible to break the trade laws.
MS _only_ got finally fined when months after months went by, and it showed no intention to comply with the ruling. It engaged in anti-EU astroturfing wars, it tried lame threats, it did stuff that was at best mocking the court, etc. You try doing that as a private person and you'd probably get some time in jail for holding the court in contempt.
Even then the fine was (A) per day that they keep ignoring the court ruling (which is how it eventually got to be hundreds of millions), and (B) with various generous deadlines and in between, and the provision that if MS complies until the deadline, it doesn't pay a dime.
So how the heck does that support such assertions as "it's like some stupid kind of import tax"?
And if you want to talk about punishing US companies, have a look at the long list of EU-based companies which have been slapped with hundreds of millions in fines from day 1 for breaking the trade laws. If anything the EU is giving a US-based company an unfair advantage and preferential treatment there. Because, again, any EU-based company in a similar situation was _not_ given the kind of sweet deal that MS was given.
Unfortunately, MS has mis-interpreted this as weakness and tried to pretty much just defy the court. Well, it didn't quite work that way.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Oh yes. By its shareholders. See, the EU is a market twice the size of the USA. Giving up on that market would send MS's shares into quite a bit of a dive.
But here's the funnier part: Not only it would make a lot of investors sell (thus speeding up the dive), but it would put quite a big dent into Bill Gates's personal fortune. See, his being such a rich guy isn't calculated just in money in the bank, but mostly in MS shares.
So between paying a couple hundred million of MS's money and losing a few _billion_ off your own worth, which would _you_ choose?
Plus, it's precisely that kind of thing that MS has worked hard to avoid. See a large part of the "secret sauce" in MS's monopoly of interlocking parts, is its products being ubiquitous. It's not just that you can't replace product X because product Y depends on it, it's also the mentality that product Y is the de-facto standard, everyone else has it, and you can't just give up on it without becoming the odd guy out of the loop.
MS has worked hard to maintain that illusion of ubiquity, world-wide. It has been known to offer massive price cuts and even prefer to overlook piracy than allow whole markets which are proof that you can jolly well live without both X and Y.
So forcing the whole of Europe standardize on something else than Windows and Office? Ooer. That would be the day when IBM', Sun' and the others' managers ejaculate in their pin-striped pants out of joy. It's not just the loss of the European market as such, but that would be the day when almost every single US corporation's executive starts hearing stuff like "sir, we can't send that document in Excel format, because they don't use Excel in Germany. No, sir, neither in France." It's the day when people start hearing that MS file formats aren't, in fact, the ubiquitous de-facto standard and can't be an ubiquitous de-facto standard.
So, heh, yeah, I'd _love_ to see MS do something _that_ stupid. Sadly it won't happen, because they're not stupid. But it would be comedy gold.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
According to Microsoft, the documentation is over 8500 pages."
And if I know Microsoft, it's all disorganized, incomplete, unusable crap... Anything to be able to claim that they have fulfilled the EU's request without making any real progress toward interoperability. Please Microsoft, prove me wrong!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
This has been discussed before. Microsoft is a monopoly, under the legal definitions of several jurisdictions. And it makes sense. From Wikipedia:
Primary characteristics of a monopoly
http://outcampaign.org/