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FSFE Supports Microsoft Antitrust Investigation
An anonymous reader sends us to LinuxElectrons.com for an announcement from the Free Software Foundation Europe, in the form of a letter (PDF) sent to the European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. FSFE offers to support a possible EU antitrust investigation of Microsoft, declaring that "Microsoft should be required openly, fully and faithfully to implement free and open industry standards." Opera Software issued a complaint to the Competition Commissioner based on anti-competitive behavior in the web browser market. FSFE president Georg Greve writes in the letter, "Although Opera Software does not produce Free Software, we largely share their assessment and concerns regarding the present situation in the Internet browser market."
Microsoft anti-trust investigation... it's the type of thing that makes you feel warm inside on a cheery Christmas day. Merry Christmas Slashdot!
No, you simply don't understand how the world works. Microsoft doesn't have any competition because nobody is better, that's what has given Microsoft their #1 position in the marketplace.
IE is the most stable and secure browser out there. Firefox was plagued by over 300 memory leaks, a metric ton of security holes, and denied each and every problem and flaw. That lack of honesty right there is why FOSS will never win over corporate customers, and the FOSS "support" model of telling the customer to go into the source code and fix it themselves hasn't proved popular with customers either.
Safari for Windows is complete garbage, and may put your computer in an unrecoverable state. Kind of like Quicktime.
So that's the two major competitors. Who does that leave? Opera... a browser which does the same thing IE does, but Opera charges you money for it. And even if they didn't charge... IE is still a far better browser, and doesn't require me to install anything.
Hey Opera, Netscape called, and they want their business model back. Seems Opera never got the memo that the Browser Wars are over.
So now, let's move our comparison over to the desktop operating system. Apple doesn't have the tools corporate customers are looking for- it's seriously lacking when you are trying to manage hundreds (or even thousands) of desktops. And the same goes for Teh Lunix. Neither of them are enterprise-quality, because their focus is on a single computer home user. Well, good luck getting enterprise customers to adopt your consumer-level technology. Not gonna happen. And I've already mentioned the Munich Lunix disaster.
So, you have laid before you the reality of the situation. Microsoft has no competition, not because "they are a monopoly", but because their product is, by a huge margin, far better than any other "competing" product. It's what customers choose after considering all the options. MS has a reputation for quality, and for the quality of their support. THAT is why businesses choose Microsoft. But hey, you guys keep blaming "their monopoly", since it's easier to do that than to improve your product to the degree to which it's actually good enough to start being chosen by consumers.
Regarding PDF, Microsoft had support for PDF in Office 2k7, but Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft in the EC (fearing that it would threaten Adobe's own monopoly in Office to PDF conversion tools), which forced Microsoft to remove PDF support. How's that for irony? An "open" format (PDF) that Microsoft is forbidden to support in its products.
As for ODF, Microsoft is sponsoring an open source ODF plugin for Office, so they already do that.
Oh, and OOXML is well on its way to becoming an ISO standard (see Brian Jones' latest blog entry on the progress ECMA is making to address the objections raised to the OOXML submission). When that happens, I fully expect you to make a post saying that all parties should be forced to support OOXML, since it'll be an open ISO standard.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000