Slashdot Mirror
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?
Looking through the article I don't really see the EU taking any more action against MS that will actually make them comply. This seems to just be a single guy saying MS is abusing its power, a standard course of action.
Help competitors build products that work properly with PCs running Windows? Even Microsoft can't do that!
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
But I would like to see what would happen if Microsoft just said "We're not changing our practices, so we won't sell our products in Europe." Would computer users revolt against the EU? Would they be angry at MS instead? Meh, it'll never happen but sometimes just to watch the debacle of it all, I wish it would.
> 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.
first, "EU Weighs Copyright Law" in benefit of end users,
then "RIAA Caught in Tough Legal Situation",
after that "Judge Strikes Down COPA, 1998 Online Porn Law"
then "RIAA Balks At Complying With Document Order" and judge is not happy with it
then the story about nebraska university wanting reparations from riaa for wasting their time,
after that, nbc embraces internet revolution in "NBC, News Corp Join to Create YouTube Clone"
then as of now, "EU Official Labels Microsoft's Behavior Unacceptable"
if things and stories in slashdot goes like that im gonna quit sex and just read slashdot.
Read radical news here
> 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
impound microsoft products at the port of entry, and no sales at all in the EU.
nothing else will get their attention.
old joke revisited... steve jobs dies and is waiting at the pearly gates. long line. suddenly, with a rush of clouds and chorus of angelic voices, a chair goes skidding across the horizon, and A Power rushes by and through the gates without slowing down.
"hey, what's the big idea?" says jobs.
"Oh, that's God," says St. Peter. "Every once in a while, he thinks he's steve ballmer of microsoft."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
MS starting giving away their browser to compete for Netscapes, whose browser was NOT FREE.
It became free as an attempt to compete with MS's illegal monopoly practices.
Both browsers were a piece of crap then, but the is irrelevant to the discussion.
Using you monopoly power to destroy a competitor is illegal. The reason it is illegal is that it gives no chance of competition for the consumer to take advantage of. The fact that the consumer has no real option is why the consumer keeps buying the product. Hell, a consumer may not know that a company is abusing it's onopoly and that's why there is no, or very little competition. in other words, they don't know enough to not buy the product.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's interesting how every time there's a news story of EU slapping Microsoft for breaking EU laws, the slashdotters suddenly come out siding with Microsoft.
:)
Never mind that they were bashing Microsoft just one news story below and complaining how monopolistic and evil Microsoft is
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 ][
1The notion that *only* USA companies would be sued for that is totally bogus and plainly untrue. It may be that USA-ones *seem* to happen more because:
t _winst_Siemens.htmla rtelboete_van_EU.html
1)It gets a higher profile when one is sued, because they make more fuss about it (together with the 'look, it's the EU against USA' attitude)
2)USA corporations are more prone to anti-competitive behaviour (maybe due to the inherent strong corporatism in the USA where one easily buys politicians)
3)EU-corporations are as bad as USA ones, only they can cover it up better
You're very close with number 1, but the biggest reasons (IMHO) are:
1) US news only reports when the EU fines a US company.
2) Slashdot only reports when the EU fines an IT company and most of them are from the US.
For those who truly feel that the EU is specifically after US companies: do some searching on European news outlets on companies fined by the EU for anti-competitive behavior. Many, if not most of them, are from the EU itself. For instance, in the past year Siemens (German) has been fined 397 million euros, Akzo Nobel (Dutch) has been fined 25.2 million euros, Solvay (Belgian) 167 million euros, Total (French) 78.6 million euros, Edison (Italian) 58.1 million euros.
And those are just from the first 2 cases I found on a quick search. Hardly a month goes by that I don't read about another big case.
Sources (in Dutch):
http://www.nu.nl/news/955922/32/rss/EU-boete_druk
http://www.nu.nl/news/725210/32/rss/Akzo_krijgt_k
You're just forgetting one small detail: the person decding if Microsoft complied with interoperabilty demands was picked from a shortlist that Microsoft themselves provided. In essence Microsoft to pick the own jury with no intervention and yet they failed. I belive that speaks volumes.
What's more, Microsoft has had 2 years to document it's protocols, and it claims it has 300 engineers are working "day and night" on the problem, but despite that, little documentation has been forthcoming, and what there has been, has been smothered under a layer of restrictive licenses and NDAs.
It seems to me that a company as large as Microsoft should have at least some idea of how its network protocols work, and if not, is capable of finding out. You'd have thought that a company that prides itself on technical innovation and "Developers developers developers" would know how to write technical documentation. So either Microsoft is entirely incompetent, or it's flaunting the law. Whilst the former is tempting to believe, Microsoft didn't get where it is today by being staffed by morons, and so one has to conclude that they're deliberately disobeying the law. Hence the fine. It's that simple.