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

Re:Doesn't matter

[Wylfing]

The only way to "beat" Microsoft is to come out with something better.

WRONG. Thank you for playing.

Microsoft products are utter crap. They are, and have always been, 10 years behind everyone else. Microsoft got where they are by establishing a choke-hold on the PC-clone OEM market and by very clever lock-in with formats and protocols. This led to application network effects, which greatly increases the inertia of the first two.

Any given MacBook off the shelf today is in every way vastly superior to any given Windows notebook. Server space is no better. One application per Windows server? Sweet fancy Moses, what junk. People keep buying Microsoft products because of one of the three reasons I listed: it's either no choice from vendors, no choice because of interoperability problems, or no choice because your applications only run on Windows. No one chooses Microsoft because it's the best technology out there, and no one will choose alternatives simply because they are better.

No, the only way to "beat" Microsoft (directly) is to have government chop off Microsoft's hands so that they can no longer strangle the marketplace. If that's not done, then eventually the market will move in a direction Microsoft wasn't expecting and they'll be irrelevant in the new space. (This may have already happened, we'll see.)