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.'"

Comments

Yes...

[drinkypoo]

...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.

Re:Yes...

[drinkypoo]

That would be good, but at least the EU is currently fining the pants off them, which is a start. No company can continually take half a billion dollar fines year after year without seeing shareholders getting pretty angry.

They can if it enables them to make two billion dollars (or whatever) that they otherwise would not be able to make. Microsoft's entire business model depends on vendor lock-in, and keeping these formats private and secret is part of that.

If you could flawlessly migrate all of your Microsoft Office documents to OO.o formats today, then huge numbers of people would leave microsoft office tomorrow; they'd be leaving Windows shortly thereafter. The vast majority of people working with computers use office, a web browser, and an email client, and very little else. It would be cheaper in every way to put them on Linux with OO.o; TCO is probably approximately the same, though somewhat higher for Windows due to cleaning up malware (which in an organization with any significant number of computers requires quite a bit of time) but is vastly cheaper up-front. Priced Vista+Office lately?

Sigh.

[Khaed]

Why is it that only Europe is standing up to them?

Re:Sigh.

[jalet]

Sorry, in the part of the world I live in we usually don't use "consuming" and "culture" in the same sentence.

Re:Sigh.

[guruevi]

I don't see them fining Red Hat, Google, Yahoo, IBM or any other company that is both highly successful and behaves according to the law. Only breakers of those laws and regulations get punished.

And although you claim that Europe ignored the tech industry for decades, they still have a larger broadband penetration rate, they have a superior electricity and telecommunications network and a lot of smart people and ideas come from a part of Europe (ok, a lot of them migrate to the US, including me but that has more to do with the European tax rates, which are killing to high salaried workers and a brain drain from US and Asian companies), look at Linus Torvalds, DVD Jon, The Pirate Bay, a lot of alternative energy 'inventions'...

Re:Sigh.

[jeevesbond]

Europe virtually ignored the tech industry for decades

Yes, Tim Berners-Lee completely ignored technology when inventing the Web (whilst working at CERN) preferring to use homing pigeons instead of a packet-switching network.

Just because the EC is taking a known monopolist to task--and going the right way about it--doesn't mean there is some sort of European conspiracy going on. Microsoft have got a massive percentage (a bit out of date, can't seem to find anything current) of desktop market share and are using that to unfairly hamper competition. They use bundling and their API to stop people from developing for other platforms. They put the brakes on IE for as long as possible because they realised their API was (and still is) threatened by web based applications.

Unfortunately the US government failed to prosecute Microsoft fully so the EC are being forced to do it. It's sad but quite simple.

Re:Market Share

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re:I can't believe I am saying this...

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

I have to laugh

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:Not taking sides...

[WaZiX]

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.

Why does Motorola use an OS designed in Finland?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

By your argument, you'd be suprised that US phone makers use Linux (Finnish) or Symbian(British) OSs in cell phones. Why do people in the US buy German cars, you'd think they'd be able to make there own premium brand cars.

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.