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EU Rejects Microsoft Royalty Proposal
pallmall1 writes "According to MSNBC, The Financial Times has reported that the EU is going to drastically reduce or even eliminate Microsoft's proposed royalties on interoperability information required to be released by the EU's antitrust ruling issued three years ago. According to a confidential EU document, "Microsoft will be forced to hand over to rivals what the group claims is sensitive and valuable technical information about its Windows operating system for next to no compensation...". Even Neil Barrett, the expert picked by both Microsoft and the EU to oversee Microsoft's compliance with the 2004 ruling, says a zero percent royalty would be 'better.'"
Hold on there cowboy...
/. doesn't mean that they deserve that money.
I'm pretty sure you won't have much problem finding or getting the same information from F/OSS software!
Just because MS wants to suck the money out of every pocket they can, use monopolistic practices, mafia like business tactics and other ills often mentioned on
If MS really wanted to be nice, they could be. They don't. They *WANT* to keep sucking all the money they can from all the pockets that they can, and will use any and all tactics that they can get away with to continue to do so.
For me, that is just business. There are worse businesses in this world. It's also why I choose F/OSS now without even thinking about what I might lose by not having MS products in my household. Whatever the alternative is, I feel better knowing that I won't be fscked in a couple years to get an upgrade or patch.
Getting paid for doing something is one thing, being forced to stop monopolistic practices is another.
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If said company is holding a monopoly, then yes.
Monopolies are, by their very definition, the bane of free market. Should you be able to hold a monopoly over a certain area of the market, the free market starts to crumble because it cannot employ its power.
In a truely free market someone could come along with a new and better idea and that new/better idea would sell better because the product is better. That's the theory behind it all. Competition amongst producers, with the consumer being the decider which product is best, giving the producers of "good" products their money, so they thrive while the ones with the "bad" products perish.
This does not work in the presence of a monopoly. MS can produce the worst software and they would still be the top sellers. Simply because companies have invested a large amount of money into their line of products.
If MS can hold its specs under cover, companies would be forced to keep buying from MS, even if their software is inferior, because competing software would not be compatible. Which, in turn, contradicts what free market dictates as the doctrine of the best product being the best selling one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, it's not. This is a commission action. Microsoft was not allowed to pick the fee, they have been proposing fees and the commission ignores them. Beware, this is going to happen to other US businesses, not just Microsoft. The EU wants their part of the pie, don't be fooled into thinking this is about Microsoft. Anything that prevents Europe from promoting their companies over American ones will be targeted. See also Apple and the EU this week. Careful who you choose for a bedfellow.
If we're going into bank comparisons here, I see it more like the Microsoft bank charging their customers a huge fee to handle their money, and other banks having to pay a large percentage of All their money transfers (not just transfers to and from Microsoft) to interact with the Microsoft bank.
And no-one uses the other banks because their bosses and family are stuck on the Microsoft bank.
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Yes yes, we've heard it all before. Why not just set up a cronjob (Sorry, Scheduled Task) to post this inacurate and uneducated drivel? It could save a lot of time and effort: you wouldn't even need to spend time ignoring the replies that keep pointing out how wrong you are!
don't start or remain a tech company in Europe.
Phillips, Nokia, Sony Ericson, Siemans and the hundreds of other small and medium technology companies all agree with you.
P.S: Remind me, which country convicted Microsoft of abusing it's monopoly position first?
And fair enough.
The EU is protecting the EU. They could make a law banning Windows all together and it would be LAW.
They want other companies to be able to produce something that resembles competition. Ie an o/s that can run windows executables. And hey Governments can do what they want with their own laws because they have their own sovereignty. Just because you Americans allow yourselves to be bribed by every corporation you have doesn't mean every other government is.
I think that what they are doing is a great step forward for interoperability.
I want Microsoft's lawyers. I could get charged with being a bank robber, then make a deal where I agree to only rob a small bit from banks, and then I'd demand compensation for loss of earnings.
It's worse than that... and it's not funny any more.
MS has been found guilty of abusing it's monopoly position in the Windows desktop market... and the EU has determined that it continues this abuse on other related product and service markets. Now, to introduce meaningful competition, the EU stipulates that MS has to reveal secretive protocols, which are the 'tools' for extending the monopoly into other markets.
5% server market revenues would be a very high barrier for competitors, according to the EU Inspectors approved by Microsoft themselves... they feel it should be close to 0%. They estimate that at 5%, it could take more than 7 years for meaningful competition. Coming to your robbing-the-bank analogy, it's like MS has a monopoly in bank-robbery the details and methods of which they will not divulge... except for 5% of their revenues. Note that he daylight robbery is still going on!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
What intellectual property? It's not copyrights - MS is not required to give code. It's not patents and not trademarks. What EU wants is the info on how the code works, so that other software vendors could make software that properly interoperates with the products of a monopolist that Microsoft is. This is only fair.
The problem is, though, that you can have the best product in the world, if it's not compatible with existing technology it's worthless. You could create the perpetuum mobile but if the energy it produces is not compatible with the ways we have to harness and use it, it's practically useless.
This might be too strong an example, since with technology THAT superior people would go out of their way to find some way to use the energy, but I think you get my point. Compatibility is what makes or breaks a product, no matter how good the product itself is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And why should MS allow others to interoperate with their email or other protocols?
Before MS, IBM ruled the computing world, with numerous other incompatible operating systems such as DEC/TOPS, DEC/VAX, Univac OS/1100, HP RTOS, etc thrown into the mix.
None of these OS's were interoperable, nor could mail even be easily exchanged between them. All were proprietary.
Yet now everyone is demanding that MS open up, sans compensation. Just because MS is very successful? IBM ruled both the hardware and software market back then, in a way that MS today doesn't even come close. Yet no one forced them to open up their protocols (although the US government did try, and lost).
Yet an upstart MS was able to dethrone IBM from both the hardware and software crowns. The current European situation seems instigated by companies unable to aggressively compete. Government regulation is hardly ever the solution to innovation.
Which they should not have to, as MAPI is (supposedly) an open standard.
It's spelled "guarantee". And that would be great, if they were trying to do that -- instead of deliberately trying to break the competition in subtle ways.
They have done this before. Take msn.com, which had a ridiculous typo in its stylesheet -- in a version of the stylesheet only shown to Opera users.
Coincidence? Maybe, but consider that this never, EVER happens the other way around -- that is, msn.com never has typos that break stuff in Internet Explorer, and their own API changes never break a Microsoft product.
No, it is not. It is blatantly anticompetitive behavior. Using their complete dominance in the Operating System business to support their Email Client business -- or even their Office Suite business -- is not just unfair, it's actually illegal.
You don't have a clue about antitrust laws, then.
Maybe it's different in Britain, but here, this kind of shit is considered illegal and wrong -- except, I suppose, for those who have contributed a large amount of money to political campaigns. (Notice how the antitrust suit against MS was dropped as soon as Bush got elected -- and notice how much MS (and MS executives) contributed to the Bush 2000 campaign.)
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Mind-boggling? No, what's really mind-boggling is that we're in such a Bizarro would that people somehow think it isn't "free market!"
Here's a newsflash: so-called "intellectual property" is a government-granted monopoly. It is an artificial construct of law. It is the opposite of a "free market!"
In a truly free market, so-called "intellectual property" would not exist. Everyone would be free to make whatever widgets they wanted, without having to worry about whether some whiny ass claimed to think of the idea first. That's a "free market!"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The only reason Microsoft has the position they do is that the governments of various countries have made it illegal for you to access information in certain ways. If it wasn't for government interference in the free actions of individuals, there would be no copyright laws at all. The government interferes with people's activities in this case because they contend an overall social good results.
Now, the governments have concluded that interfering with Microsoft will produce an overall social good. For Microsoft defenders to speak as if government interference is always a bad thing is ridiculous: they are complaining about the very thing that gives Microsoft any position at all.
No, it's not for free, it's part of the punishment for breaking the law. The protocols have a monetory value, and the EU has determined as it is entitled that rather than fine Microsoft the dollar value of the protocols, it is fining them the protocols themselves.
Remember it is "Interlectual Property", and when you break the law the goverment is entitled to confiscate what parts of your property it sees as reasonable.
When you break the law, you can't keep the spoils that you gained illegally. The EU is attempting to take Microsoft's illegal gains away from them.
While the interlectual property is theirs, and legally constituted court has decided that as punishment for breaking the law they have to hand it over possibly for no cost. When you break the law you don't get to decided what your punishment is, and the courts are empowered to seize your assets as part of the punishement.
'' The EU is basically demanding MS to hand over their IP for free. ''
Actually, they are not. What MS is supposed to hand over for free is in no way intellectual property.
Lets say for some reason a product needs to transmit two numbers A and B. They could be transmitted in the order A, B or B, A. They could be transmitted as decimal numbers in text format, or binary. If binary, they could be transmitted as 8, 16, 24 or 32 bits in various byte orderings. All these variations are completely arbitrary and cannot be considered to have any intellectual value. However, for compatibility a competitor needs to know which of these arbitrary variations a product uses.
This information could at most be considered a trade secret. In this case, however, keeping that secret a secret would be illegal, therefore it is not a trade secret.
There is no reason at all why Microsoft should get any compensation for this information.
And wouldnt even be necessary if they had complied with standards in the first place.
The EU should force microsoft to comply with published standards, or if necessary extend and publish the extensions to those standards (and propose the standard be updated accordingly).
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It is established that they have a de facto monopoly on the operating systems and office package markets. Their mail client has been included on every OS they have released since windows 95. Now if they intentionally break the protocol with which the mail client (Outlook, Outlook Express and whatever it's called in Vista) interoperates with a mail server in order to leverage the market penetration of your own product (Exchange) then you have broken the law.
Remember, it's not illegal to have a monopoly but it is illegal to leverage said monopoly in other markets.
And don't give the whiny speech about how EU only does this to US companies, Microsoft or your granny. EU takes a tough stance on monopoly exploitation in European companies alike.
What Microsoft are being ordered to open up isn't their intellectual property, but part of the usage instructions. Admittedly it's a part that only means anything to rather advanced users, but nonetheless it's information to which users of Microsoft products are entitled. If I buy a guitar amplifier, I expect to be able to plug any guitar into it -- not just that manufacturer's guitars. And in the back of the handbook, it will give me the all information someone skilled in electronics would need to know in order to present a suitable signal to this amplifier -- the input impedance and expected voltage level. And in all probability, the connector will be a 6.3 mono jack. Now all I have to do is design my guitar pickup to have that voltage output into that impedance input and present it on that connector. More to the point, according to the law of the land, the amplifier manufacturer cannot stop me. If they tried to use some bizarre proprietary connector, any luthier would be within their rights to copy that connector for the purpose of making an instrument compatible with that amplifier.
Similarly, if I buy a Microsoft server, I should be able to choose any manufacturer's client to work with that server -- and if I buy a Microsoft client, I should be able to choose any manufacturer's server to work with it. By withholding information that people have a right to know on the flimsy pretext that most people would not know what to do with it anyway, Microsoft have created a monopoly for themselves -- a monopoly which might not have existed, had third parties been in a position to supply clients interoperable with Microsoft servers and servers interoperable with Microsoft clients. Unfortunately, withholding that information in the first place was actually illegal, and Microsoft must be punished.
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What standards ? In this area of connecting server and client software Microsoft is setting a lot of the standards.
It's very hard to say that something is a standard unless you publish it... an unpublished standard is very similar to a few other of my favorites...
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What it seems like to me, is that Microsoft is trying to get the following system in place (Bad Car Analogy Warning)
You buy a new SUV, and need new tires, you have to go back to the Microsoft Dealer, because your new "MS MudRover" Only take tires with a diameter of 17.428 inches and a 12 inch width... You also can't get new rims, becuase the MS MudRover uses a proprietary 19 Pin/lugnut system to attach the rum to the axel, oh yeah, and they have a patent on said 19 Pin system, as well as making 17.428Inch diameter tires with a 19 inch width... In short, Vendor Lock In, becuase nothing else works
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That was not the point I argued for. Microsoft is asked only to disclose the protocols necessary for third parties to communicate with Microsoft's products. In your analogy, you will be asked to disclose the protocol used to communicate with your application, which is HTTP, and format of the data in your application, which is HTML. Both of them are royalty-free and open standards. If the web application you are talking about is public, it appears that you are benefiting from the openness of HTTP and HTML without paying royalty to their inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. And in the same fashion it does not mean that what Tim Berners-Lee has developed is worthless!
The EU is protecting the EU.
True - Except the EU makes tries to enforce its policies worldwide, not just within the EU.
So when the EU finally forces Microsoft out completely, that will count as their choice. But when American companies can't sell "Feta" or "Cheddar" cheese, in America, we have a problem.
The EU just serves to further prove that all sufficiently-large organizations will abuse the power of their position (and I don't say that as though the US hasn't done the same for the last half-century).
Just another Boeing-vs-Airbus dispute, except Microsoft has no European analogue. And that pisses the EU off far, far more than anything Microsoft itself could ever do.
I think that what they are doing is a great step forward for interoperability.
Interoperability with what? I had to explain to a coworker just last week (after she made a v8-specific PDF that no one could open)... If you just tell Acrobat to always save in v4 compatible mode, everyone in the world can read it. Same goes for MS Office. Just save it Word/Excel 98 mode, and plenty of other programs can open it.
Or to put this another way, for a recent contracting job, I wrote a niche-industry software package that outputs a totally opaque closed format. I make the only program that does anything even remotely like it. Should I expect the EU to start threatening me when the first copy ships to somewhere in the EU later this month for "stifling local competition"? I do so hope so, as I have no assets there that they can threaten, and gleefully look forward to telling them to go pound sand...
Someone else already said it, but I'll repeat: EU policies send a very, very clear message - Don't set up shop in the EU.
For a lot of companies the calendar function in exchange /outlook is just as important as email. that's one of the main reasons why they stay with microsoft exchange.
Exactly. And for small and medium-sized businesses (200 employees), Exchange is very good at what it does. My problem with Exchange is that it requires an Active Directory, which means you now need to purchase another pile of machines to do DC work, fill your FSMO roles, run backups of said DCs, and so on. And, of course, if your userbase platform is not Windows, your Exchange client options are either a joke (Entourage on the Mac) or non-existent (Linux, BSD). It all adds up to a lot of money just to run an email/calendar server. Of course, if you already have 1) Windows clients, 2) an Active Directory, and 3) don't mind locking yourself in even further, then Exchange is a no-brainer. Once you're in... good luck getting out.
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If Microsoft had played by the rules, none of this would have happened. They are the abusive monopolist. How this suddenly becomes the EU being abusive after the documented evidence of just how anti-competitive Microsoft is is quite beyond me.
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