EU Threatens Microsoft With Antitrust Sanctions Yet Again
from the keep-going-and-going-and-going-and-going dept
The EU is going after Microsoft again. Already it has gone after the software maker several times in recent years for various things, such as including a copy of Windows Media Player in Windows XP, and for making Vista too secure. It's looked for some time like EU regulators simply have it out for the company. This time, Neelie Kroes & Co. are threatening to fine the company $4 million per day for failing to make certain technical information regarding Vista available to its competitors. It's a little hard to figure out what's actually going on behind the scenes here. Microsoft, of course, insists that it's been forthright with information, and that the EU is demanding too much. Specifically, it says that the EU wants Microsoft to hand over any innovations that aren't patentable. If this were true, it would set a disturbing precedent, since companies shouldn't be forced to file a patent to keep something secret. Again, There's probably a fairly big gap between the underlying truth and the the war of words that the two sides are playing out in the media. But from the looks of it, it would seem that Microsoft is once again being targeted on questionable grounds.
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All i have to say is:
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Questionable grounds?
They want to re-invent the wheel every 6 years in effect stifling all independent innovation for Windows. It makes me sick and so does this article that would somehow make it out like Microsoft is recieving unfair treatment.
It is a unfair company period and it deserves any headaches it gets along the way to world domination.
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You don't have to work well with others...
Microsoft has a bad problem with thinking they can do whatever they want. This isn't the 80's, and computers have come a long way. If they don't want to join the rest of the world in making software play well with each other, maybe they need to have their toys taken away. I know we are already in talks of moving away from MS Office, and even have had discussions about leaving Windows.
If MS didn't over value their products and treat their customers like criminals, maybe they would get more loyalty.
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re:
"Deserves the headaches it gets" - You win. This is the stupidest thing I've read today. If Microsoft chooses to "MAKE" something and make it somewhay proprietary then good for them, it's a good business practice move. The EU is being greedy and I think MS should say "Hey... shut up, or we'll stop supporting you. If you want us to pay $4 mil a day we won't and you can't do anything about it."
Casper:
"the rest of the world makes software that plays well with others"
You are obviously not a software developer, computer engineer, or even someone who knows anything more than AOL.
"we are moving away from MS Office and have discussions about leaving windows" - MS Office rules the world, like it or not. You can leave windwos and all that happens is that you realize you can't support jack squat. Windows is a tool. Microsoft just happened to make their tool required in the workplace. Stop acting so jealous.
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Re: re:
?? I guess you entitled to your opinion however narrow it might be.
"
If Microsoft chooses to "MAKE" something and make it somewhay proprietary then good for them, it's a good business practice move.
"
Uhh Sure I guess from a money grubbing point of view you may be right. On the other hand from a cooperative point of view where everyone can participate to make the tool we call computers better then no, thats not good for MS or us.
"
You are obviously not a software developer, computer engineer, or even someone who knows anything more than AOL.
"
And you are? Give me a break and stop busting balls when you got none.
"
- MS Office rules the world, like it or not. You can leave windwos and all that happens is that you realize you can't support jack squat. Windows is a tool. Microsoft just happened to make their tool required in the workplace. Stop acting so jealous.
"
Wow your comment really shows us how intelligent you are. If Windows was really a "tool" then it is a very strange sort of tool that has so many licenses and conditions that it is not comparable with any other "tool" in the shed.
Your egocentric view of the software universe is the exact kind of mentality that prevents computers from becoming the great tools they should be. Jealous? Yeah I am real jealous of MS licensing schemes and how they treat every user as a would-be criminal.
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I agree but there is no way that..
Where Microsoft will fall short is everywhere else. Microsoft is trying so hard to become more than PC-centric software.
The landscape is changing. Software is showing up in more places: Cell-phones, PDAs, Cable Boxes, Automobiles, hand-held devices. Microsoft is trying to enter these markets with WinCE and MediaCenter but the cost in hardware, deveolpment and licensing becomes restrictive.
The small agile companies that can launch and shine with the Open-Source tools will be so inexpensive by comparison. And it is all about the Money.
In the end,
a company will do what is needed to make money.
If you are not in the business to make money
then you are not in business.
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Hitler running things again over there? sheesh
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Proprietary means exactly what?
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Don't post if you are a complete moron.
For crying out loud, if I see one more moron spell LOSE with two O's I swear I will kill a kitten.
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re:Anonymous Coward
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Software
Microsoft was one of the first companies on the Market to develop an Operating System for the average home user. Since then, they have added great features and made their product much better to be compatible with the expanding market. For 3rd party vendors to cry "It's not fair! We can't compete!" is foolishness. If they really wanted to compete, they need to be more innovative than Microsoft. Also, it's not that hard to compete with Microsoft, look at OpenOffice. Sun has come out with a great line of Office tools that you can open and save Microsoft Documents with. And the Nero MediaPlayer is much better than Microsoft's version.
All I'm saying is the 3rd party vendors need to quit whining and decide what the next step is. Legal battles like this are hard to win and look silly to the rest of us.
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I got it...
MS can just stop supporting any businesses outside the US.
No more internationalization of the OS or Applications, no more time and money devoted to research on new technologies used outside the US only... no more outsourcing to foreign countries, no more.
Think of all the money they'll save by being a US only company. Make people buy their product in US markets if that's what they still want... keep the money in America, and screw the rest of the world and their back stabbing political bull.
Their companies can't compete because their companies release inferior products... plain and simple.
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Not so Fast There
This means things like Samba and NTFS-interoperability are hindered by MS's inability or refusal to comply with the order.
Governments, and by inference, their people, have a vested interest in making sure that the OS that is found on 90% of their machines is as open and interoperable as possible.
Microsoft has two choices - comply or pay the fines. I say hooray for the EU for holding their feet to the fire, unlike the US DoJ
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RE: Not so Fast There
How is it Microsoft's fault there engineer's are incompetent? How can documentation be "confusing" if you have an experienced and knowledgeable engineer? It sound like a political move on the EU's part to get more information from Microsoft than was previously agreed to.
This means things like Samba and NTFS-interoperability are hindered by MS's inability or refusal to comply with the order.
I don't know where you hail from, but I have a Linux box running a Samba server and all our Windows machines, including Vista, can connect and use all it's functionality just fine. Vista was actually easier to setup and configure with the Samba server than any of the XP machines I've dealt with. I think Microsoft is moving in the right direction.
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Re: RE: Not so Fast There (TheDock22)
I think you misunderstood - Microsoft's own chosen guy said that Microsoft's documentation was useless. So if someone that MS trusts condemns the documentation, it's pretty clear that it is MS's fault for not providing proper information.
On the Samba/NTFS note, last time I tried to mount an NTFS drive on Linux - 6 months or so ago - it required compiling a kernel module with no guarantee that it would not destroy data. That might have been solved now, and all your Linux/MS implementations may run fine (can you chmod on a file in an NTFS mounted drive? You can't on FAT32) but at what expense?
Microsoft has been ordered as the result of court trial to make that interoperation as simple as possible and they have yet to comply as testified to by their own chosen person.
It doesn't get more clear than that
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Nail its another paw to the floor.
As much as MS often abuses its product users, and constantly annoys us with security holes even Ted Kennedy would have no problem walking through. Despite its cost Microsoft Office does what MS claims, it works and works well. I don't think I've ever had a problem using MS Suite 2003.
Vista is another matter but the market will determine what happens to it. The same way the market determined what happened to Windows ME. Not everyone can use Linux easily, or the idiot hand holding of Apple OX, and so Windows is a middle ground that for all its issues function fairly well.
MS is what it is. Windows/VISTA are all tools that you either use or get rid of, but if you really hate MS use one of the thousand and one Linux OS's out there. Or if you can't get rid of Windows do a duel boot, but their are options to Micrsoft. Lets face it heavy tech and computer users have never been Microsoft's target consummers. Businesses that look for the ability to support the software and help explain to them what the software does has always been Microsofts customers.
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Microsoft and Charlie McCreevy
Mr McCreevy has often been uncriticized as being overly solicitous of Microsoft's interests in Europe. Indeed, he has been called the EU's Commissioner for Microsoft.
I do not see Microsoft as a victim.
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Re: Microsoft and Charlie McCreevy
Innovative people, it's what keeps technology moving forward.
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EU Nonsense
Doesn't anyone see the pattern repeated through history where gangs demand a cut off of capitalistic business? To quote Goodfellas: "Fuck you. Pay me!"
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Uh, come again...
You can cloak it in whatever good intentions you want or say the EU is taking the higher ground, but you'd be kidding yourself. Microsoft has lots and lots of money and the EU wants to dip their hand in the cookie jar.
The reality is, Microsoft is not the only option. What's next? Lets fine car manufacturers because they manufacture and include wheels on the cars they sell - which is an unfair advantage to aftermarket wheel manufacturers. Or how about Google EU companies don't rank high enough in their search results?
Call it what you want, dress it up however you'd like. It doesn't change the fact that this is a shakedown - pure and simple. Its a textbook case of a rich, foreign company with weak public perception being extorted for some cash. Its not to hard to see that no matter what Microsoft does to comply, the EU will continue to move the bar to either cripple Microsoft products to the point of being an also-ran or to the point where they can continue their cash extraction.
I realize its en vogue and all to bash Microsoft right now, but come on, this is getting a bit ridiculous. Yes, there products suck, Apple, Linux are so much better, they're an big, bad, evil corporation that throw puppies against walls just for kicks. We get it! So, don't buy their products! Develop competitive products! Go back to pen and paper or Windows 98!
Yeah, its not easy. So, instead, we can just whine about how mean they are, charge them a $4m per day import tax and complain when the price of their products is higher than in the US.
80 percent of Europeans believe in evolution, yet, apparently, the concept "survival of the fittest" escapes them.
Use their products or don't. Its not a necessity of life and its certainly not Microsofts job to make life easier for their competition. They made a mistake when they agreed to their initial demans.
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Vista and WHY
Please read:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
It makes perfect sense and I do not see how several of those points (about rising cost to make and support hardware) about Vista and what it will do the market can be argued against.
Being an avid video gamer, and thanks to them the gfx cards will cost more and such
I will never buy, or even steal Vista, or support it for any of my friends.
M$ can shove Vista's DRM where the sun don't shine.
M$ can bend over and ask to be penetrated by Hollywood, but I shall not.
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I don't like any government getting involved in a company.
But I have seen the type of anti-competitive behavior that microsoft is accused of. I have seen them sign agreements with a company to go in one direction, then develop software counter to that agreement. I've seen the documents.
I've also seen microsoft add function calls within the OS that are not documented. These calls are used by their applications (Word, Excel, Media Player) to enhance their functionality to provide features for microsoft products that other vendors cannot provide because they are not aware of the internal function.
A person can read the above two paragraphs and explain it as "competition", but it isn't "fair". One could also read those words and encourage more government involvement, but no company wants an auditor sitting in the next cube. In my opinion, one of the purposes of the government is to prevent unfair competition and monopolies.
I think that if a company is cheating, it should be punished and prevented from further dishonorable actions.
In this case, if microsoft wants to offer a closed operating system, and products that run on it, then it must be willing to prove that it is competing fairly. If evidence shows that it is not competing fairly, then it has created the situation where the government is compelled by its citizens to investigate and possibly punish it.
No government decree "forced" microsoft to make the business decisions it did. Microsoft took risks and implemented strategies that had a chance of resulting in this type of response from governments. They are not the first "big company" in the world. This is not unknown territory or behavior.
They made their choice, now they deal with the results.
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re billy
I'm going to kill another kitten...
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To all those arguing.
that is all.
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re _Jon
ennnngh... wrong... try again. If you don't like MS, or their business practices, DON'T BUY THE PRODUCT AND STFU!!
They don't have to prove crap to you or anyone else, and they are not competing unfairly, the people that comete with them suck, and are claiming it is unfair, there's a difference.
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re_ techguy83
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Re: re_ techguy83
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And I buy it too.
But I also realize that if other development teams had access to the same API's as the developers at Microsoft, I'd have even better products to run on the Windows.
But by not documenting API's they've added for their own application's use, they've cheated me out of better products by other software developers.
I don't mind that they added API's - I don't like that they hid them.
And you don't need to yell - it makes you look like a moron.
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Fair?
Being an avid video gamer, and thanks to them the gfx cards will cost more and such
Your point? Microsoft never marketed towards video gamers, there isn't enough money it it. They make business software, and for businesses Microsoft has really changed the way the world communicates. Mac and Linux could never hold a candle to what Microsoft has accomplished in the business world.
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Please explain
This OS was created by MS and MS has every moral right not to disclose any code that they do not wish to disclose.
Let's pretend this was the console market. Every developer needs to get permission to develop for the consoles. The manufacturer then would release applicable apis to the developers.
The European governments should stop wasting time bashing MS. They should either fund the creation of their own OS, or use one of the many other Operating Machines out there. The sooner they stop complaining and the sooner that they start doing, the sooner they will fix the problem.
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Re: Please explain
And MS is following the tactic of drag its feed in releasing their protocols and cry to the public and the EU has say as we say in my country:
A mi no me torea ni mi madre esta me la pagas
An they are making to pay through the nose.
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Re: Re: Please explain
The european goverments has not asked anything about windows only about its network protocols. Microsoft is the dominant OS in the Desktop and they showed that MS was changing their desktop OS to talk with their server better than with anyone else server OS. And due that all over the world is ilegal for any monopoly to use it to gain advantages in other markets. they have told MS that they can't have secret client server portocols so it can't kill the server competition as MS did with its secret API to kill competidor in the past.
And MS is following the tactic of drag its feed in releasing their protocols and cry to the public and the EU has say as we say in my country:
A mi no me torea ni mi madre esta me la pagas
An they are making to pay through the nose.
Microsoft is not an Operating System, it is a company. Microsoft Vista is an Operating system. It is not a monopoly, either. It is used on a minority of computers. It is Microsoft's product. Microsoft can put whatever code it wants into it's product as long as it does not intentionally sabotage another product in doing so. If people do not like it, they can chose not to buy Microsoft Vista.
Again I ask, how is Microsoft Vista a monopoly? It is a minority OS. Nobody is forced to use it.
You don't see the same arguements in the gaming console market. Each console has its own proprietary programming and licenses.
The only problem that I see, is that people would rather cry instead of fix the problem. To fix the problem, just use a different OS. I personally prefer Microsoft XP over OSX and Vista.
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Re: Re: Re: Please explain
Even more MS offered the code and the EU told microsoft no thanks.
So the cuestion is to make sure that you can choose the server OS that you prefer linux, solaris, OSX server, windows 2003, VMS, OS/400 ... although most of the desktops are running some version of windows.
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sniveling panty wastes
If Microsoft was smart, they'd just say, "...piss on the EU, our product is no longer available in your area/market."
Do you think Bill & the boys would really care if the EU doesn't buy (read 'bootleg') Windows?
If people in general don't like Microsoft, then don't buy their products, use their products, or whine about their products.
Nobody owes "you," anything, you goddamn commies!"
If you don't like the price or the product, exercise your brains, show a little intelligence, - and don't buy the product!
Microsoft is one of many companies in a global "free" market, where consumers are "free" to make their own decisions and choices.
"open source" = "cheapskate goddamn commies"
wah, wah, waaaaah.
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This is not about Vista
The clue is that Microsoft are not cooperating with a request for disclosure of information they agreed to 4 years ago
If any of you had even vague plans for Vista 4 years ago I'd love to talk to you, as you are clearly further ahead of the game then the worlds largest OS manufacturer - think of the money we could make
Simple fact is 4 years ago Microsoft agreed to an antitrust action which was worked out actually quite favourably to them (they even got to pick the guy in charge of it)
The anti trust action was based on the fact that they were using their near monopoly in the field of PC and end user server OSs, to try to gain unfair advantage in other fields by stopping other forms of server etc talking to MS servers as well (they did this by not telling people HOW their OS's and hardware should talk to windows)
I used to develop web apps on windows servers - i'd love it if Microsoft could produce a web server that worked anywhere near as well as some of the competition. I would also love it if Microsoft could develop a storage area network solution that worked as well as the competition and that my Wintel guys could compehend
Fact is they don't - they rely on restricting information to other companies so their technologies won't work as well, to try to gain advantage for their own sub-standard solutions (and even *then* the competition are still better)
Its this "it's my ball" behaviour that pisses me off - its anti-competitive, anti-innovative and a whole lot more. I LIKE Microsoft OSs for my sins, my users on the whole prefer them, we should not have to adopt sub-standard technologies in other areas just to be allowed to use their OS in the one area it *is* good in
As for all the "commie", "Microsoft should just pull out of EU" etc posts - grow up! At least the EU has the balls to stand up to Microsoft, unlike the back-hander based bitches bending over in the US congress
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Re: This is not about Vista
To you muppets who say ms should ditch europe, you do realise there are 490 million people in europe with many large and very successful business based here?
You lot are truly retarded. Please stay in america and don't ever vist europe,you're not welcome.
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lol, europeans are dumb see above post
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