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EU Official Labels Microsoft's Behavior Unacceptable
InfoWorldMike writes "EU commissioner Neelie Kroes has lashed out at Microsoft in comments to European parliamentarians Thursday, saying it is 'unacceptable' that the company continues to gain market share using tactics that were outlawed in the Commission's 2004 antitrust ruling against the software vendor. 'Three years later Microsoft still hasn't complied with the main demand imposed by the European antitrust ruling: that the company share interoperability information inside Windows at a reasonable price to allow rival makers of workgroup servers to build products that work properly with PCs running Windows.'"
...and until someone actually gets serious and imposes a penalty against them that will actually induce them to change their behavior, like preventing them from selling their products until they comply, this is what's going to continue to happen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why is it that only Europe is standing up to them?
> Let the marketplace decide...
Firstly you need a competitive market for that to work, that's why we have competition laws. Secondly, this idea that free markets are some democratizing force is total bullshit.
HTH.
> Europe is trying to force its socialist business practices on the the free world.
Where is this free world and what do you call it when the US uses the WTO to dictate trade policy for the rest of the world?
Microsoft are free to stop breaking the law anytime they please.
The Americans also ruled that MS used unfair practices, and they also kept buying their stuff. So what are you implying?
-- Cheers!
Bill has correctly figured it out that it is better to cheat,steal, and lie, pay a hefty fine later and OWN the market than it is to play fair. The longer that a gov. takes to play these games with MS is only to MS's advantage. If EU really wanted to stop this, they would tell MS if you have 1 month and then we charge you 5 x all of the EU sales/month each month. Only when it is not in Bill Gates best advantage will he comply.
Since it has been 3 years and MS has not complied, it is obvious to me that EU will not really be cracking down.
I may not like BG but you have to admire him. He knows how to run circles around govs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The only way to "beat" Microsoft is to come out with something better. No amount of fines will really matter as long as they still hold the dominant market share.
The reason is that people creating software for computers have the greatest number of opportunities if they make them windows compatible. And since making something cross-platform is a bitch, it's much easier to get 90% of the market by doing windows alone. And so that's what people and companies will do.
So we can either do one of two things
1) Force people to develop cross platform software and hardware (yeah right)
2) Create an operating system so much better that the majority adopts it (extremely unlikely, but better than "yeah right")
The only other thing I can think of is FORCE companies like Dell, HP, Toshiba, Sony, IBM, Lenovo, Gateway etc to stop forcing Windows down our throats on computers we buy from them and sell the bare machine at a REDUCED price. I'm sure Microsoft is strong-arming some of them to some degree, but if we just flat out make it illegal to force-preload then they have little choice.
Question everything
You do realize Europe is consists of over half a billion people right? Computers have become ordinary products, leaving such a market would be corporate suicide... Now one of the Main goals of the EU is to defend the customer, all the EU are doing is what they were appointed to do. Such antitrust lawsuits are common places, be it a US company or not. Believe it or not it's not the task of the EU to ruin Microsoft, their task is to defend competition amongst companies inside the European market. Hell this would benefit many American companies as well and that's a good thing. The whole point is to allow customers to have the best solution for the best price, where that solution comes from is of absolute no importance.
The EU only wants to regulate the way US credit card companies deal with EU citizens.
Welcome to the global community. All the EU is saying is that a fair set of rules need to be put in place so that people don't get abused. What EU proposes against Microsoft would help US companies too, it is just that the US goverment lacks the balls to do this.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The US government is a completely gutless pet of the plutocracy that really rules the country, so unless there is dramatic change of regime nothing will happen there.
The rest of the world, except the EU (it seems) doesn't really care because they are too primitive to to realize that being dependent on a single US company is a problem.
The funny thing is that the EU has a very simple solution to the MS problem; simply fine MS 10000 EUR / day / undocumented protocol identified and use the resulting money hire 10-20 hackers pr. protocol to reverse engineer it and publish the docs.
Anyone should be allowed to submit protocols, if MS has implemented both a server and a client then it needs to be documented.
Ideally this principle should extend to other areas as well, there are tons of secret protocols that do nothing more than serve as a weapon of vendor lockin.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
And believe it or not, if it actually were game over for MS in the EU, all that precious windos-only software would be ported to OSX, Linux, etc. in record time. The EU market is huge, larger than the US market. Any company producing software would make sure it's available in that market, windos or no windos.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org