Haavard

Posts tagged with "ec"

EU antitrust case: Does the EU hate Microsoft?

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 4:12:29 PM

I'm surprised at the amount of hateful comments against the EU after it chose to enforce its competition laws in the case against Microsoft. The EU is apparently Socialist, Communist, or at least hates companies with success, or was that just American companies?

Ignoring for a moment the fact that most companies the EC is dealing with for violation of European Competition Law are European companies, let's look at just how reliable the claims about the EU having it in for Microsoft are.

They are not very reliable, it turns out:

David Hammerstein, ex-Member of European Parliament for the Greens, tweeted last week: 'SOS to everyone as sources confirm that Kroes is about to eliminate "open standards" policy from EU digital agenda; Kroes has been under intense lobbying pressure from Microsoft to get rid of interoperability and open source goals of EU.'

So there you have it. Going with what Microsoft is lobbying them to do seems to be a strange case of "European bias against Microsoft, and that's why they started the antitrust case"...

8 comments

Bill Gates sums up Microsoft's abusive history

Wednesday, November 4, 2009 11:00:00 AM

ec, antitrust, eu, bill gates ...

Note/update: For those too lazy to read the whole thing, this is about Microsoft's history. It shows their history of consciously anti-competitive behavior. It is aimed at those who have little knowledge of Microsoft's history. To learn more, read this document by ECIS: A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm

It seems that some people are still doubting that Microsoft has consciously sought to undermine competition by abusing their position in the market. In fact, some are outright denying any wrongdoing on Microsoft's part, and if there was any wrongdoing then it was surely unintentional.

Sadly, such history revisionists are creating confusion about what actually happened, but this quote from a Bill Gates memo to the Office product group in December 1998 sums up Microsoft's attitude:

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

So as you can see, Microsoft has a history of anti-competitive behaviour. You can agree or disagree that it is necessary to get the Government involved to deal with antitrust cases (Microsoft itself certainly thinks so, and they have filed their own antitrust complaints, e.g., against Google), but what you cannot deny is Microsoft's attitude and behaviour through the years.

And yes, this has continued even in recent years.

50 comments

Why monoculture on the Web is bad

Thursday, July 23, 2009 10:02:22 AM

ec, web, plugins, browsers ...

One of the comments on the antitrust complaint against Microsoft I see a lot is: "So what if most people are using IE and aren't aware that there are choices? I'm using Opera/Firefox/Chrome just fine."

Sometimes we may feel that something doesn't really affect us. But does IE's dominance on the Web affect us even though it might not feel that way?

The answer is: Yes, definitely. But the problems with a monoculture on the Web extends beyond browsers! A single point of failure is a bad thing no matter what.

Browser monoculture

The recent ActiveX security flaws in IE once again show us that a browser monoculture is a bad thing because those looking to infect people's computers will have a single target with a very nice return of investment. And those millions of compromised computers can be used for things like sending spam to the rest of us.

But it goes much further than just IE. One could argue that just about any kind of dominance of the Web is a bad thing.

Microsoft cancels hearing in EU antitrust case

Friday, May 22, 2009 2:56:59 PM

ec, antitrust, eu, microsoft

Microsoft has decided to cancel a hearing it requested in the current EU antitrust case. According to Microsoft's Dave Heiner, this is because the dates of the hearing coincided with the "International Competition Network" competition law meeting, meaning that "many of the most influential Commission and national competition officials with the greatest interest in our case will be in Zurich and so unable to attend [their] hearing in Brussels".

Microsoft is concerned that this will deny them their right to be heard, and their "rights of defense", despite their admission that the hearing has no legal weight as such.