Slashdot Mirror
China Launches Antitrust Probe Vs. Microsoft
snydeq writes "China has launched an investigation into whether Microsoft unfairly dominates its software market, according to a state media report. A working committee of China's State Intellectual Property Office is investigating whether Microsoft engaged in discriminatory pricing and will also look at Microsoft's practice of bundling other software programs within its Windows operating system, according to the report. The probe is part of a greater sweep of operating systems and other software developed by multinational companies that cost much more in China than in the U.S. 'On the one hand, global software firms, taking advantage of their monopoly position, set unreasonably high prices for genuine software while on the other hand, they criticise Chinese for poor copyright awareness. This is abnormal,' a source said."
I don't think you can call it a monopoly if all the companies software in your country is pirated.
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
Next I hope is an antitrust probe of the Chinese government in business.
"set unreasonably high prices for genuine software while on the other hand, they criticise Chinese for poor copyright awareness. This is abnormal"
Actually, that sounds pretty normal to me.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Don't read too much into the story. All it means is one more high party official is looking to get his share of payments to the top officials in China. Once a few million $ are safely handed over, the probe will be frozen, to be thawed only during the negotiations of the next payment.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In other words, China is jumping on the bandwagon of countries that is playing the "Sue Microsoft Lottery" to get some extra cash. I mean, I don't like Microsoft's products, particularly their operating systems, because I think they've completely lost touch with what a computer is supposed to do, but when it comes down to it, it's our fault, not Microsoft's, that their junk software is so ingrained in the entire computing industry. We are the ones who vote with our dollars, and so, if you don't like Microsoft, or their software doesn't get the job done for you, then don't pay them your money. But don't wine and complain about them either. And certainly don't play the Microsoft lottery. That's ridiculous.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
No they criticize China because you are a bunch of pirating communist scum. As to price manipulation being a bad thing... from a communist country that has practiced both price controls and currency manipulation. Not to mention the closed market.... This is just a chance for China to shake MS down.
China isn't any more communist than for example the UK, Canada or Australia.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
So there is an anti-trust investigation over the one legitimate copy of Windows in China?
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
In other news Microsoft is seeking an injunction against the FOSS community for unfair competition practices. "It is entirely unfair that they offer their software at such unreasonable prices. The pricing policy of not charging users for the applications they use severely impacts our market penetration.", a Microsoft Sales Representative said.
Except for the part where they proclaim to be.
China is being heavily leant upon by the US and its stooges to do something about their prevailing culture of piracy - you know, the great DVD markets of Hong Kong and Shanghai where every film is available a month before it reaches the cinema, all that stuff. It's all to do with international trade agreements; China gets to make more money selling abroad if they stop ripping off Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Hitherto China has been happily ignoring Microsoft's monopoly by simply pirating everything. If they're going to go legit then they're going to make damn sure they don't end up paying through the nose for it, so they're raising the same monopoly issue that the US and the EU have done. After all, if China is going to play fair, then so must Microsoft.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
... car makers bundling radios, gps, air bags and brakes within vehicles. More at 11.
You're totally right. They aren't communist. What they are is fascist.
"Anti-individualistic, the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.... The fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.... Fascism is therefore opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number...."
Best description of China I ever read. That's straight from Mussolini's "The Doctrine of Fascism."
On a related note anyone read the article on how Chinese police jailed parents who tried to go back to the faulty death-traps - I mean schools - their government had built. The police were also instructed to keep foreign press away from the schools and to not let anyone take photos. A pretty good example of how the most important thing is the state above all - including it seems the needless deaths of children.
Once again, China is just copying other countries. I bet their probe will be half the cost, too.
Just another step in China's eventual bludgeoning of the American economy. First you openned the door to trade with them. Now they outproduce you, and now they seek to sue your comapnies for wrong dealings while undercutting your prices and pirating the hell out of your goods. A lot of good people saw this coming, and now we just sit back and watch the sad dance play out to its bitter end.
US trades with China.
China outproduces USA on material items.
USA moves to Intellectual Property.
China ignores IP laws except where it suits them to make money.
US economy collapses
China is new global superpower.
That just gave me the best chuckle I've had all day
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
China To Microsoft: "You're trying to have a monopoly on what we've rightfully stolen"
So it's quite possible for a Communist country like China to change their official ideology to Han Chinese nationalism and corporate state/slave labour capitalism and still be just as far from the UK, Canada or Australia.
So don't be fooled that they given up on 'Communism'. The PRC was never very socialist anyway, most European democracies went much farther down that path.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Perhaps this is a prelude to the Chinese government looking to do something better with American dollars than have them sitting in US government debt. If the Party were looking to buy out Microsoft, they could really have the rest of the world bent over a barrel, enjoying a tremendous amount of control over anyone that uses MS software.
Not only that, it finally gives the BSA the power it's looking for - let's hear it for the Chinese military fighting the BSA's battles to defend Microsoft's owners and their IP...
I claim to be the King of Prussia. Doesn't make it so, anymore than China's claims make it genuinely communist.
I heard about the chair throwing, but shooting people? Balmer has gone too far!
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
But just like with the EU, this is will be nothing more than an attempt to extort money from successful American corporations. I know /. hates MS, but any sincere customer centric resolution to anti-trust *outside* of the corpration's home country would be done diplomatically with that countries government.
Agreed 100%, and it is an absolute farce that they were awarded the Summer Olympic Games. Tens of thousands of people were displaced in order to build facilities and erase "unsightly" slums.
I'm interested in seeing what the Tibetans get up to during the Games though - my guess is shenanigans will ensue, with the predictably heavy-handed military response. These Games could (hopefully will) end up being the biggest clusterfuck in the history of the Olympics.
Very true. The far crazy right isn't that different from the far crazy left when you truly look at it.
This no value added comment brought to you by one bored guy.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
I salute your use of alliteration in illustrating your point, my liege.
I hate printers.
You see, that's where I get really foggy on this whole MS anti-trust issue. I'm pretty sure it's considered "unfair practice" to sell your product to one area (State?) for less or more than another at base cost. (making one market pay more to cover the cost of underselling your product in another market ... ahem $3 per license Windows in Africa(?)) Shipping and taxes would influence the end price. This is what confuses me about how Microsoft does business and how it's still considered legal. The cost of Windows should only be influenced by taxes since digital transfers really cost nothing. (I guess you could add in the shipping cost of CDs though...)
Isn't it global anti-trust to sell a product for less in one country than you do another? Is there such a thing? Who would bring down the hammer on such things?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Agreed 100%, and it is an absolute farce that they were awarded the Summer Olympic Games.
I can't believe the IOC even considered China. It's like hosting the games in Nazi Germany and having Hitler preside over the event.
Oh wait...
Ordinarily, no, I don't think so. There's a natural limiting factor to this kind of thing, because if you sell your product much more cheaply in a poor market than in a rich one, then people will make good money buying up stock in the poor countries, shipping it to the rich countries, and selling it on at a profit while still undercutting your official price there.
The problem comes when the product has a near-zero marginal cost to produce, and near-zero weight. It costs Microsoft almost nothing to stamp out ten thousand Windows disks and sell them in east Asia for a dollar each; if that's what it takes to compete in that market, a dollar per copy is better than nothing. But similarly, it costs me almost nothing to buy up ten thousand Windows disks and ship them to England, there to be sold in a street market; I can undercut their official price by a huge margin, and still turn a healthy profit.
Thus Microsoft play silly buggers with the EULA, claiming that their product is licensed not sold, and that it's illegal to use in England the copy they sold in China. And Hollywood play silly buggers with region coding as well, to make sure Europeans don't buy DVDs from America of films that aren't yet in our cinemas, and to make sure neither of us buys DVDs from China priced super-cheap to compete with the pirate market. Is that legal? Don't know, but it's sure as hell not right. If globalisation and free trade benefit the corporations, who'll outsource your job at the drop of a hat, it should work for us too: I want to outsource my DVD buying, thank you very much.
One thing I'm pretty sure of is that this is not legal within the EU. You can't sell a product cheaply in Slovenia and dearly in Germany, and then complain when the Germans buy in Slovenia. Apple ran afoul of that a little while ago with their iTunes pricing structure, though I'm not sure how that turned out.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Well, I tend to disagree.
Imagine you are responsible for the whole IT infrastructure of some company. The size of the company does not matter. Imagine you choose to deploy say Microsoft Office 2003 or (if you are more oriented or pushed towards smaller costs and/or increased "freedom") even OpenOffice.org .
Now try to imagine a reaction of a CEO of given company after:
To add more spice, imagine that client was a big one and potential income (and thus real loses) are quite big.
:)
All that thanks to inability or whatever of Microsoft to use and follow open standards or at least some decent backward compatibility and our quite small ability to push them toward that (thanks in quite big proportion to what some people call "dominant position in the OS market for PC" or, more importantly "dominant position in the office document format market for document exchange" which stems from the firts one), which would ussualy make the above example non issue.
hany
U.S
* Banker makes loan to whoever they damn well please.
* Loan doesn't get re-paid
* Other bank takes over banks assets and screws depositors over 100k.
China:
* Banker makes loan to favored state owned company or other entity.
* Loan doesn't get re-paid.
* Government recapitalizes bank.
U.S
* Banker makes a bunch of questionable bad loans
* Retires with golden parachute package
China
* Banker makes a bunch of questionable bad loans
* Banker is executed by government
U.S
* Bankers en masse make loans to fund housing/stock bubble
* Government runs to see how they can loosen regulations to help the banks make exponentially more money and profit
* Bubble bursts, banks are bailed out by government discount window loans, TAF, TSLF,etc
China
* Bankers en masse make loans to fund housing/stock bubble
* About 1 year after it gets going government raises real estate transfer tax or stock trading taxes and bank reserve requirements to purpousefully punish the speculators.
* Bankers who make ridiculous corrupt loans are executed. Some banks who didn't get swept up in the bubble keep operating as usual
Long story short. In China, unlike in America, the politicians actually have far more control of the economic activity in their country than the bankers do.
It's because the the IOC like the secrecy of the Chinese Government better than any democracy. The worst games for the IOC were Lillehammer where everything was in the open - including the bribes paid to IOC officials to host the games.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
...if this isn't the hammer calling the sickle black.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
There is very little difference between fascism and communism.
Both ideologies claim that society is greater than the individual. Both ideologies condemn all actions that don't benefit society as a whole. Both ideologies support environmentalism.
The difference? Communism sees society as encompassing all humanity, while fascism sees each state as its own society. Fascism is prone to nationalist posturing, while communism isn't.
Both fascism and communism oppose free-market capitalism. Fascism refers to an ideology called "corporatism", but that has nothing to do with corporations in the modern sense; the "corporations" in corporatism are basically trade guilds. Corporatism is about both putting society under the control of a collective, and tying such collectives into the state. It fits in with the whole "society as a whole" model, with each function of society overseen by its own collective, and all the collectives are part of a larger collective (i.e. the state).
China isn't really fascist; they allow multinational corporations to do business there, which real fascists would condemn. If China was fascist, they wouldn't let even local companies practice unfettered capitalism the way they do. A fascist state wouldn't let Chinese companies pollute as much as they do, nor would they let the companies do things like put lead paint into toys.
Now, I'm not defending fascism in any way. I'm a staunch individualist, and I despise both fascism and communism. My point is that China isn't really any more fascist than they are communist. Well, they do more than their share of hyper-nationalist posturing, but that's about it. China is simply a totalitarian state that tolerates capitalism. The free market is the one exception to China's totalitarian control over their people.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
No, you pay more because you don't have large institutions negotiating the price on drugs on larga scale (such as countries with nationalized health care), and because your insurance companies rape you for them, as their interests are aligned with those of the insurers. That, and the fact that the FDA functions in a completely innefficient manner.
Do remember that a lot of big pharma is based on Europe. Take Novartis for example.
Wouldn't that mean that they aren't communist and are a dictatorship ? Because in a communist government, there are no classes. So lets see we have A) Classes, B) Unequal distribution of wealth C) some people are really poor, others are filthy rich, and D) one party/person has total control. Seems like a dictatorship to me. And communism != dictatorship. They may be called "communists" but only in the way that the USA is called "free", in name alone.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
"The PRC was never very socialist anyway, most European democracies went much farther down that path"
Really?
Did they organize all farmers into Colletives? Did their government take over virtually all manufacturing enterprises (i.e. state own enterprise) ? Did their Communist Party install representatives in all enterprises to enforce doctrinal purity?
There has been tremendous change in people's thinking and the organization of productive activies within the last 10 years - since Teng Xiao Peng redirected China toward a more pragmatic path.
Listen to people who've visited China and don't rely on academic abstractions. US people have a bipolar attitude toward China. When they spout cliches toward one another, nothing is learnt and they will not gain a realistic picture of China as potential partner or competitor.
National Socialism
as opposed to universal socialism known as communism.
So when the government controls business, i.e. "nationalizes" or "socializes" it, that is fascism. At least in the original definition.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I'm warming to this executing bankers concept; can
I join the Chinese Communist party?
That should stand on all software boxes.
.... you can of course go out, buy it (even if you know it sucks) then complain and sue ....
If they bundle whatever with windows, it is their business, and the whole EU suing is a ridicule.
Am I a MS fanboy? Not. I do not use Windows (I have one machine with it that I turn on once a month or less for testing software).
Up to2 weeks ago, the only MS product I used was an xbox 360, which naturally died, and was my last ever MS product I purchased. (I love my new PS3 though, so thanks MS to open my eyes).
Yes, for servers it is Linux and BSD, and MAC on desktop.
So No. I do not like, or protect MS, but they should price their product as they like, and they should bundle it with whatever they want.
How comes no one says : hey you have MSN messenger in xbox, and so you are damaging google and AOL( AIM), and ICQ.......
Everyone should have the right to say to a customer : "I hate you, and now your price is 100, even though your neighbour's price is 40."
It is like I sue BMW for having an mp3 player bundled with my car, which is built in, and is a bit problematic to remove.
Stupid world, stupid people. Then again, if you do not like it, just buy something else.
Oh... yes I switched to MAC after Vista came out. One week of usage, and I saw that this was the end of me and MS.
just my 2c
Most banks in America are FDIC insured. Post-Great Depression, can you name an instance where banks loaning money too generously resulted in "screw[ing] depositors over 100k?" Does this happen often? And does this happen because banks are pressued to make loans to "the little guy," whatever the current definition of that term is?
How many bank executives can you name that retired with a "golden parachute package" after failing at banking? Were they forced to retire, perhaps by the board of directors? Does that not sound like a clear case of "the system works?"
"Bankers en masse make loans to fund housing/stock bubble"... You realize that the housing bubble screws banks out of any money related to mortages? Y'know, how this "housing bubble" you say those evil bankers made involves them being stuck with a devalued house and a bad loan? I can see how they had to scheme hard for that deal - it must go all the way to the highest levels of our government!
Continue living in ignorance, and tell me where you cash your paychecks and keep your savings. I'll be happy to call you a hypocrite.
DATABASE WOW WOW