Microsoft Loses EU Anti-Trust Appeal

Kugrian writes "Microsoft has lost its appeal against a record 497m euro (£343m; $690m) fine imposed by the European Commission in a long-running competition dispute. The European Court of First Instance upheld the ruling that Microsoft had abused its dominant market position."

Comments

Go Samba

[Marcion]

The Court of First Instance's judgement, like the commission's before it, sees Samba as the means for competition, in the Work group server space (i.e. file servers, print servers, etc). All potential competitors to Microsoft are using Samba, (the commissions own research found that 98% of competing products in this space use Samba), so it is good that the commission and the CFI are keen to get the documentation from Microsoft in a form that open source projects such as samba can use.

P.S. Shamless plug, I ranted a lot about this on my own site

It's not about fines, it's about Samba and freesw

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Ignore the fines, they're nothing.

The important thing is that when MS eventually publish their specs, they will not be allowed exclude free software from using them.

This is what FSFE and Samba have been working for since 2001, not fines.

http://fsfeurope.org/projects/ms-vs-eu/

Re:This isn't justice: too little, too late

[gravos]

Good points all around.

Though I do wonder what level of fine it would take for Microsoft to really change it's way of doing things instead of just making whatever paltry change the regulatory body required (like selling a version of Windows that probably no one is going to buy without IE bundled in).

I wonder because even after some pretty hefty fines in the past they seem to have changed direction very little as a company.

I still don't like it.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Big as it is, 600 m$ is chump change for MSFT and it would shrug and treat it as cost of doing business. Further this creates a "rally around our flag" effect kind of support of MSFT. Many Americans would go, "The damned Europeans, the gall they have punishing a Red White an Blue company.." .

What I would really like to see is that the customers of MSFT see that it is in their best interest in having an alternative to MSFT in the desktop, server, office documentation products arena that will benefit by perfect 100% compatible interoperability. No customer would buy a Samsung TV that can play only Samsung DVD player. But why these corporations don't demand such compatibility?

One answer is that, MSFT tax is not very big. Just 40 billion dollars a year max. For most companies, payroll, medical insurance, office rent, furniture, liability insurance, transportation, travel etc cost more than office PC/laptop. So they are not looking for savings here.

Second, companies only focus on the differentials with their competitor. Stated differently, Coke does not care how much it spends on pc/laptops and office software as long as its competitor, Pepsi, is not spending a significantly lower amount on the same category. This explains the herd like behavior of the corporations. No body looked to outsource to India till about year 2000. One did. Showed some possible cost savings. Whether or not the savings were real, that first company's investment in India is real. Suddenly every suit is asking, "what if it pays off big time for them? What if we get left behind. Let us play it safe, hedge our bets and let us also have a presence in India."

I don't know when it will happen. But at some point some big company would make it a priority to have a second vendor in the office software arena, and invest a sum to show it is serious. Like a herd every suit who was asking, "What is our India strategy?" would be asking "What is our second vendor for office strategy?". Of course, not without some serious kicking and screaming and "Total cost of ownership" studies funded by MSFT. But when the corporate pendulum swings, it swings inexorably and usually it will go well past what is reasonable reach the other irrational extreme, corporations investing so much on "second vendor" strategy that the saving don't justify the investment. But that won't deter these suits, It never has.