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China Gives Microsoft 20 Days To Respond To Competition Probe
An anonymous reader writes "China has given Microsoft three weeks to explain "compatibility issues" in Windows and Office that could violate Chinese competition laws. The State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) questioned Microsoft Vice President David Chen and gave the company a deadline to make an explanation, the agency said in a short statement on its website. Microsoft's use of verification codes also spurred complaints from Chinese companies. Their use "may have violated China's anti-monopoly law", the official Xinhua news agency said on Monday."
China is more concerned about free economics than the US? Weird.
No government should be forcing its citizens into proprietary software which writes its data in proprietary ways without good, permanent ways to retrieve that data in the far future. Formats like OpenDoc are fully documented and open to public scrutiny. Not to mention the costs and risks of dealing with licensing; working with software that has no source code available.
...Steve
Apparently just having the .iso file should be good enough. If Microsoft products can't be easily pirated, then China is pissed.
China is not likely to roll over as easy as the US did after Microsoft cranked up the brib^h^h^h^hcampaign donations in the way of the US antitrust case.
Windows and Office are full of Microsoft's proprietary technologies, the same way OS X is of Apple's. That shouldn't be news to anyone. I wonder what China is trying to accomplish with this. Just install Linux then and you can have all your open standards. What, you say that the QA of Linux desktop is terrible and not suitable for enterprise deployments? Yeah, that might be a problem...
What the hell is this crap still doing alive??
DICE don't get it. They never will.
Lol, that's a good one. Whenever an American company competes with a Chinese one, they typically ban it to ensure the Chinese one wins (think Facebook, Google, Twitter...)
"One problem that Microsoft is having is keeping their Wongs straight."
So which laws are being violated? Did China give Microsoft a specific list of complaints, and if so what are those complaints?
Are you kidding me??
They try to force Microsoft to give them source code, so they can pirate it and create "competitive" product.
I'm no fan of the Redmond beast, but this might not be just about competition. China has been moving from bluish-reddish China to Seriously Red China lately. Its true though that Microsoft's products *are* incompatible, and not just with Linux and every other system out there, but with previous and future products of their own. They go out of their way to make products that don't work with anything else even their own former products are incompatible. Fortunately, unlike in the US under the Bush Administration, China will take strong action, and there is nothing the Beast from Redmond(tm) can do about it.
Its a magnet for stupid lawsuits and everyone hates it anyway.
And seriously why does MS care what browser you use... they make nothing on it either way.
of course, every OS comes with a preinstalled browser... Possibly MS should just install the chinese browser instead in china. I'm sure the chinese have something appropriately stupid to foist on people. Throw that at them and then everyone can be annoyed by the chinese government for the first five minutes of using a new machine before they uninstall it and install something they'd rather have instead.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Microsoft has been flagrantly violating competition law in more corrupt countries for years by locking people into their software through undocumented & incompatible protocols and file formats. Hopefully the Chinese government will at last fix this problem.
We need to stop helping China; let them figure out how to develop themselves with Russia as a main partner. China sits on the sidelines and arms terrorists and causes conflict and watches us spend out blood and treasure.
Maybe China should take their Anti-Monopoly (Monopoly defined as the exclusive possession or control of something.) law and use it against the single political party system they have before worrying about anything else.
You can use powershell or vb script to download web browsers but it's unlikely average joe will know how to do this if there is no IE available for Windows. MS has too many damn employees especially all of the world, 100k+. MS needs to cut down to at least 40k employees(all redmond) and just close all offices overseas. I read somewhere the majority of employees are not coders. Just freaking simplify things just get rid of the European and Chinese headaches. They will save more money and probably be able to reduce freaking product costs.
If the rest of the world is not happy with the way MS OS products are bundled with their IE than they should move to Linux and that's the end of that. MS should not fear Linux anyway. The De's are buggy, too internet dependent when it comes down to software installations(dependencies issues), no regression testing which leads to newer bugs, still needs the cli when you need to install newer software for a frozen in time distro or really just to fix issues, there aren't any open source software that can really compete against Windows based software. No gimp is not photoshop and blender is not maya.
MS needs to simplify their operations to relieve all the headaches and become more efficient.
China already beat Google's ass, I suppose it's MS's turn. MS was pretty much OK with the fact China has free-for-all piracy with their OS/office products with the expectations that they would be charging companies for licenses and the more people are familiar with/use their OS the more it'll be the OS of choice in the future, any computer plaza has any version available for 5 yuan (less than a buck), fully cracked..but now that China is putting some effort into getting involved in the desktop OS game - target MS! Fun.
I know first hand that the SAIC *can be controlled* like an attack dog, it's a very corrupt agency. I'm not saying that MS isn't in breach of any regulations or anti-monopolistic practices in this case...what I'm saying is China doesn't typically give a shit about anything media/software companies are doing until they have an interest or feel a threat, then they decide to bring the hammer down hard and there is very little you can do about it because the general public doesn't care enough to start a ruckus - pirated copies of whatever you're selling will always be available anyways. If anyone could have evaded, Google would have - but simply got exhausted and pulled out with significant internal pains (and continuing pains.)
Microsoft should respond to the Chinese; Where is the payment of all those thousands or billions of pirated MS operating systems being used in China? You have 20 days to pay up or we shut down all Microsoft software in China!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
I am a Chinese working as a China analyst at a think tank. It is becoming more and more apparent to many people, that the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knows it is on its last straw of survival.
The party is facing severe and endlessly increasing systematic stress on all fronts:
1. Increasing external oppositions from all other countries in the world including all of China's neighbours. They are forming more and more alliances and becoming more outspoken with rising strengths against China, in addition to increasing anti-China sentiment from people in all other countries. Many countries including Canada and Australia and U.S. have just tightened their immigration policy to prevent Chinese from entering their countries. Even on these casual internet message boards, when you look past the paid Chinese propaganda professional commenters, you notice rising general anti-China feelings from all over the world.
2. Increasing internal severe and massive violent social unrest and anti-CCP mutiny from people of all Chinese living places. To beat down internal dissent in mainland China, the CCP every year is forced to spend even more money than on its massive military budget. All the semi-external places (Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, Macau) are fighting harder and harder to break free from China. Taiwan is for all practical purposes already a separate democratic country, with its own army specificly trained to fight the PLA, and anti-China sentiment there (especially among younger Taiwanese generation) is at all-time high after seeing how China violently suppress Hong Kong as an example of "reunification". This whole situation is continuously worsened by the free flow of information, with Chinese people knowing more and more from travelling abroad and learning about truths from jumping beyond the "Great Fire Wall" on the internet.
3. Its own economy and social system never able to advance to higher level beyond mass skill-less manufacturing, due to complete absence of law and common morals. High technology and innovations and scientific development all require many citizens working together voluntarily contributing long term in a system they trust, with things like rule of law, no censorship on knowledge, no restrictions on speech and expression, copyrights, open minds, patents, common morals when collaborating and trading with each other etc. These qualities are all destroyed in modern China by the CCP. When was the last time you heard an announcement of technology development or innovations or scientific breakthrough coming from a Chinese organization / company / university? You haven't because there ain't any. Unlike mass manufacturing factory work, high level human developments cannot be forced by or bought with a dictator's central planning. The only way contemporary China gets these things is from stealing and spying from all other countries e.g. using Chinese scientists working overseas to steal secrets, installing spywares in foreign executives' electronic devices when they enter China etc, but these efforts have become more difficult since the whole world has caught on to their act.
This systematic fatal flaw is why you do not see even one Chinese brand or company that can compete in the international market in any industry of the human race. For example Lenovo, who is already one of the few Chinese brands some people may have heard of, cannot make either the chips that power their computers or the operating system that run them, so it is just one of many plain vanilla boxmakers without any competitive advantage offering only cheap price. Another example Huawei is blacklisted by many countries and international customers because everyone knows Huawei's products send all communication data back to the CCP. This CCP weakness is also why China cannot produce even one home-grown science Nobel Prize winner in its history, nor one famous business guru, nor one inspiring leader, nor one cultural icon, not even a third rate national soccer team ( Chinese work hard individually but do not work
When Gates set up the deal to outfit China with MS OS, they didn't mind the product controls.Now they want to change the game plan? Someone better explain the contract to them.