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Hungary Officials Raid Microsoft Office
Steve writes "Hungarian government officers raided the offices of a Microsoft subsidiary this week, as part of a probe into the company's relationship with large software distributors. From the article: 'According to the statement, Microsoft used sales conditions and offered software distributors incentives - described as loyalty discounts - so they wouldn't offer clients anything but Microsoft Office products. Such behavior could lead to the exclusion of competitive products from the market and violate European Union rules, according to the authority known as the GVH.'"
Doing their best to eliminate all competition with their monopolistic practices.
It's no different than their blood deals with SuSe and such. Tie everyone up with obligations to not use other products or make them pay royalties with Microsoft's threats of lawsuits for crap patents.
I bought my last Microsoft product years ago. No way in hell will I support a company like them.
And for those that talk about Microsoft's "innovation", I'd like to counter with their outright thefts of code (Stacker), their sabotaging other company's products when they detect them running in Windows (Word Perfect), their screwing customers so they could pretend that IE was a critical component of the OS (Win98), and all the other dirty tricks they constantly pull.
Doesn't Bill Gates have enough money? When will they actually produce a quality product instead of pushing junk on people? When will they let the market actually support innovation?
Yeah, yeah - I know I am no Microsoft fan boy and this may get labelled as flame bait or a troll, but seriously - this is just another example of Microsoft's dirty tricks and using their weight to screw everyone else - including their very own fan boys.
Not directly related, but Hungary is very much into open source. Also, according to google analytics for my open source project, I get quite a few hits from Hungary. And remember European Firefox usage from a few weeks ago? Hungary is one of the leading adopters of Firefox in the world. I wonder if this kind of IT culture has any bearing on how hard they will go after M$.
Yes, because government raids are the cornerstone of freedom and democracy.
Seriously, I think the EU should start charging companies like Real, Sun, etc for the service they provide in helping them to succeed in business without really trying.
No, Hungarian Notation was invented by Charles Simonyi when he worked at PARC. When he took a job at Microsoft and tried to introduce it there, it was completely misunderstood, and that bastardized version is what most untrained programmers came to know (no thanks to Microsoft's developer training). Since they seemingly couldn't even be bothered to pronounce his name, it became known as Hungarian Notation.
The real thing is incredibly useful, and I encourage all unfamiliar with it to read through Joel's article.
Lies about crimes