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Should Microsoft Be Excluded From EU Government Sales?
David Gerard writes "From Groklaw: Heidi Rühle, a Green Party MEP, has presented a question regarding whether or not Microsoft should be considered as having failed to fulfill the conditions to participate in public procurement procedures in Europe, as laid out in Article 93(b) and (c) of Financial Regulation — '(b) they have been convicted of an offense concerning their professional conduct by a judgment which has the force of res judicata; (c) they have been guilty of grave professional misconduct proven by any means which the contracting authority can justify' — and the Commission anti-trust penalty just happens to fulfill both of those conditions." The EU Commission is required to respond within 6 weeks to such a question from a member of Parliament.
They're basically a criminal organisation according to EU law. I don't want to deal with an organisation that habitually breaks the law.
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Lets suppose MS is "banned" from selling to the EU. Expect
1) MS to sell it's products through "resellers".
2) Thousands of EU ministries and departments applying for waivers because the ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE Powerpoint for them to continue in their vital work.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
If Microsoft wasn't the best choice, why elminate them from the process?
Who is going to benifit the most from this, and what is the connection to this group?
Is there an eu msft that they are trying to shepard to the big time, or is it simple corruption?
Who wins with MS out of the picture?
Software chosen by government tends to trickle down to corporations, which tends to trickle down to home users (although to a lesser extent). So if Microsoft software were to be replaced in EU governments it would eventually influence a population that's larger than the US and Canada combined.
Developers: We can use your help.
After all it's a political party, and they must have more on their agenda than environmental and health issues.
Not every green party member can be minister for environment and/or health.
Using GNU/Linux on older hardware is more than feasible.
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
Not really...The issue here is whether or not the EU as an administration should order products/licenses from Microsoft.
The issue isn't whether or not Microsoft can do business in the EU. The European union bureaucracy is huge, but not that huge.
As an European and an user of open source products I don't support this proposition.
Microsoft has been punished already. Time to move on. Microsoft is already facing serious competitions and its dominant position looks less invicible than it used to be.
Leftists such as this green party are taking it as an easy ideological shot against big companies (they hate them). I don't support that.Technically/Financially Open Source is the way forward for public services. But if Microsoft can prove that their products are objectively better for an administration, then I see no reason why it shouldn't be used.
Environment? It's commonly accepted knowledge around here that later versions of MS operating systems require beefier hardware and upgrades than certain darling competitors. (I'm running modern versions of Ubuntu on computers my workplace was throwing out.)
That's increased power, more equipment that has to be recycled (lest it be landfilled), and more goverment money that could be spent on an environmental or human health program that instead goes into the pockets of an American Corporation.
To be honest, it's actually a rule that should be followed, not some stupid play for power and media attention. Those convicted of abusing their power aren't eligible for government contracts.
It's an intended publicity stunt of course - the commision will not ban Microsoft. Unless there'll be serious climate changes in hell within six weeks.
And as such, I don't find it that bad - brings Microsoft's non-compliance back into public view, puts a little pressure in MS, though not too much..
That's a lot about being an opposition party is all about - spreading information (and sometimes propaganda of course) about something they care about.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
...or are most people blind to the fact that just about every corporation out there today (and yesterday) had participated in monopolistic behavior at some point. I can name off quite a bit, so do all these too need to be banned from doing business?? Lol, Let who is without Sin be the first to throw a Stone!
A crime is still a crime, even if lots of other people are doing it too. Abuses of monopoly positions are detrimental to competitors and customers - why shouldn't action be taken to prevent it?
And yes, other corporations currently abusing their position (and ignoring court rulings telling them to stop) should get the same treatment.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Your complaint makes no sense. Elected officials should be enforcing *ALL* the rules, not just a few that helped get them elected.
No sig for you!!
But this shouldn't be about punishment. It's about who you want to do business with. I don't think any government should buy licenses from a software company that's been found guilty of manipulating the software industry. If you can't play by the rules you shouldn't be allowed to play at all.
Developers: We can use your help.
Microsoft has repeatedly shown that they really don't give a damn about rules. They are for everybody except Microsoft. Laws... The same thing.
Regarding Ethics, Morals, etc. Those are for wimps. These are not in the Microsoft vocabulary.
Microsoft expects to violate every norm of civilized society in order to maintain their market position. The world be damned.
It appears that only the EU has the balls to stand up to Microsoft and try and make them behave. Will it work? I doubt it but, it is making Microsoft stand up and notice. I see that MS has just released well over 50,000 pages of secret programming info to the EU so maybe (very small maybe) something good may come of this.
I really don't understand why any company needs to corrupt society as much as Microsoft does to maintain their position. Wouldn't it be cheaper to do provide a superior product honestly?
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Software chosen by government tends to trickle down to corporations
Perhaps in Soviet Russia ;)
In the rest of the world it usually works the other way round.
I think excluding a source of solutions (as bad as we claim it is, regardless) could have a negative impact on the market and competitive.
You do realize that MS is under threat of being banned for the crime of undermining the free market and using criminal actions to make competing products artificially worse, right? How exactly would removing them from bidding on a subset of new contracts for the next 5 years negatively impact competition? There are still dozens of companies with solutions that could bid and compete with one another fairly. In fact, companies that have not bothered investing in those markets and competing because they knew it would result in very poor ROI, would now have financial incentive to invest in competing solutions. I really don't see how you think this would negatively effect competition.
Of course Microsoft could be engaged in underhanded tactics (vis ISO standardization of Office Open XML..).
Microsoft has been engaged in underhanded tactics and after years and years of slow court proceedings they were convicted. The law says that certain government agencies should not give new contracts to companies convicted in this manner for 5 years in order to insure that companies that have been following the law have a chance to compete, instead of having to go up against a company who may be winning contracts solely because their criminal actions have allowed them to undercut others or otherwise prevent them from providing a bid on projects.
I'd like to think that Microsoft's ubiquity may very well have raised the bar/baseline for many different software products.
You'd like to think that? Why? Most software products follow the standard market model. Investors look at a market and potential ROI. They then invest in the markets they think will provide the best ROI. When one company has a huge influence in a market, that allows them to use that influence to break compatibility with others, thereby introducing an artificial problem with that competitor. This means the "monopolist" can make more money with less effort to compete. It also means investors looking at the market see that investing in that market will have to account for trying to work around these artificial compatibility problems in addition to other costs, and at the same time they will always have a very well funded competitor who can take a loss in the short term to undercut them on cost. In short, very few companies invest in those markets and fewer products and innovations result. This is one of the main reasons why antitrust abuse was banned in the first place. It slows down innovation in a market, not speeds it up. I think you have a very wrongheaded idea as to what influence MS has had on markets. Think 8 years after the invention of tabbed browsing before most users saw it. Think 18 years since the first desktop OS to introduce spell checking for all applications, and 90% of users still don't have it.
Ubiquity of the (somewhat decent, I guess) baseline bundled Windows Mediaplayer results in raising the bar in competing media players (iTunes, Winamp?, etc.)
Are you joking? The top two media players are shipped by companies who bundle them with products they have a monopoly or near monopoly on. What does that say about the quality of the players themselves? They aren't competing based upon the merits of the players, but upon the relative popularity of Windows and iPods respectively. For years most users who tried ripping their CD collection put CDs into their computer, told it to rip them, then discovered it had ripped to WMA format and added DRM to prevent them from copying it to any other device, including the most popular portable player. Then consumers had to install different software or figure out how to change the settings and do it all over again. That is not quality. That is the epitome of a really, really poorly made piece of software dominating despite being horribly inferior, and pe
I don't see it as being punishment at this stage. If the EU has laws on the book saying it can't do business with a company in Microsoft's situation then they shouldn't be doing business with them or they should change the law. Their hands are effectively tied by laws on the books. If they continued to do business with MSFT then not only would they be breaking their own laws but it would open a floodgate of legal challenges from companies excluded by this legislation in the past.
Microsoft has clearly NOT been 'punished enough' as they keep offending.
The last EU fine was because MS had taken no action after their previous court loss.
Perhaps if Ballmer had to spend a few months behind bars?
If Heidi had been a member of a German conservative party and had been asking whether or not it was right for the EU to use Open Source Software, then I would indeed wonder who her campaign contributers were, seeing as these days it's mainly Microsoft that would stand to gain from such a measure.
However, seeing as she is actually a member of a more left wing party and her proposal only stands to disadvantage the software market's 800-pound gorilla, I seriously doubt that she's receiving any extraordinary monetary compensation for her efforts in this case.
So, you seem understand the principle of how campaign contributions can influence politicians, but have succeeded in applying it in exactly the wrong way; kind of like putting the left shoe on the right foot.
EU regulation on procurement does govern all public agency's down to the communal level. It is not only the EU administration who would be excluding M$
Are you sure it's not "time to move on"? I was hoping paying a parking ticket would buy me the right to park wherever I want for the rest of my life.
I disagree. Currently, MS doesn't have any serious competition, simply because people refuse to use competing products out of fear, concerns about compatibility, etc. But very little is keeping people from switching to OpenOffice; it has all the important features that MS Office has, it uses the standard format ODF, and it reads legacy MS Office documents very well, frequently better than MS Office itself.
If the EU government mandated that all government systems/agencies use OpenOffice and ODF, it would be huge. Suddenly, not only would tens of thousands of computers switch to OO (losing MS licensing fees for them), but many companies would start using it so they'd be compatible with the government. The network effect is very significant.
Of course, this could all be easily done without ever taking a look at Linux, since OO works quite well on Windows, and MS would probably preserve their Windows dominance for a while, but MS Office is a bigger cash cow than Windows, and greatly weakening it would cause a huge blow to MS's finances.
Microsoft has been punished already. Time to move on.
Would you hire a convicted child molester to watch your children? After all, since he was convicted and released, he's been punished already, so no reason to take any further action, right? Or, would you take past actions into account and disqualify criminals from certain activities (like molesters watching your children, or buying more things from an abusive monopoly, even at the time when they are not complying with the judgement against them). But for some reason, supporting illegal and unethical corporations is "just business" and somehow acceptable.
Leftists such as this green party are taking it as an easy ideological shot against big companies (they hate them). I don't support that.
That's the real issue. You don't like the party taking shots, so you think it fine to pay money to a company while they are breaking the law. It's all about politics. Good to see that morals are ignored when they interfere with politics. The sooner you emulate the US political situation, the sooner your economies will implode like ours is.
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