Microsoft hit with 280m euro fine (BBC)

Microsoft has been fined 280.5m euros ($357m; £194m) by the European Commission for failing to comply with an anti-competition ruling.

The software giant will appeal against the fine which follows a long-running dispute between it and EU regulators.

The move follows a landmark EU ruling in 2004, which ordered the US firm to provide rivals with information about its Windows operating system.

EU regulators also warned Microsoft it could face new fines of 3m euros a day.

Content and clarity

The daily fines will come into force from 31 July if Microsoft fails to supply "complete and accurate" technical information to rival developers, the EU said.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5171126.stm

other days, the bear gets you.....

Nor should they.

they shouldnt have the monopily on this. It isn't fair.

But in the US monopolies are not illegal. They have an obligation to their shareholders to protect their assets like Windows.

Gee really? I had not noticed that recently! :grr:

We have monopolies all over the place! Microsoft is just one of many that are out there (ever heard of a entity called "Walmart"?). We need to break up monopolies so there will be once again something called fair competition.

Maybe they are "illegal" but you'd never know it. :argh:

:kick:

They say more about it.

You might try reading a few books about President Theodore Roosevelt. He was the monopoly breaker upper master of our times and we need another TR RIGHT NOW to save our country! :patriot:

:kick:

to the letter of the law they ARE. However, hence the reason for the AT&T breakup and the Microsoft Suit. Anti-trust laws are enforced haphazardly, if they were applied equally, Microsoft would have been spun off into many different divisions for Office, Games, Windows, etc. But that didn't happen, some companies are more equal to others, I guess.

is that they are NOT being told they have to disclose their source code, they have to disclose the system calls and functions that enable others software to efficiently interact with windows...hardly the same thing.

but ultimately the problem for MS is that courts are now telling them how to run their business, which in the long term is not good for consumers.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with any vendor bundling products together like MS does with media player. Doesn't it seem a little bizarre to you that EU judges are telling MS that they CANNOT give away media player and IE? Should we be paying for them instead?

A little background on retail practices:

Go to a grocery store and check out the chip isle, see any Clover Club products? No? that's because Frito Lay dictates to retailers how much shelf space they want. If they don't get the shelf space then the grocery store does not get the "custom pricing".

Check out the soda isle, sure is a lot of space for Coke and Pepsi huh? Same deal, if the retailer refuses to give them the space they want, no "custom pricing".

I could go on and on and on.

The EU (and the US, if it gave a *hit about consumers) has *every* right and duty to regulate MS when their actions are not in the public interest (as determined by due process according to laws passed by our elected representatives, etc., etc.).

The problem, as I see it, is that Microsoft--the operating system company--gives an unfair advantage (source code, trade secrets, advance knowledge of OS changes, improvements, features, flaws, etc.) to the *other* Microsofts; the ones that make a browser, a media player, productivity software, client-server software, etc. That makes it impossible for any other company wanting to make one of these products to compete fairly. And fairness is what anti-trust laws are all about. Because if the so-called "free market" isn't regulated to be fair, consumers don't get the best products at the best price.

So, before Chimp & Co. let MS off with a free pass, the judge in the case had ordered that MS be split up--surprise--into different companies that would make operating systems, applications, etc. I don't know enough about why the EU didn't do the same, but kicking them in the pocket book is I guess the next best thing.

Remember, corporations exist at the discretion of the public, and we have every right to demand that they serve our interests or be dissolved. See Tom Hartman's excellent writings and radio show for more info.

Cheers!

Jay

but beyond that I don't see why the government should be involved. I do think that the way MS treated Sun and AOL was clearly predatory. Welcome to DU btw! :hi:

Microsoft doesn't have a RIGHT to do business in the EU, they have a privelege to do so. The EU is fully within its rights to do what it wants when Microsoft doesn't comply with the law. Microsoft is a foriegn owned company in the EU, why shouldn't the EU helps its own domestic companies to compete?

then that is not exactly capitalism is it? Sounds rather predatory/coercive to me.

then you are correct, it isn't Capitalism as defined like that. But know this, the US government and EVERY OTHER government on the planet does the EXACT same thing. In various different forms, from loans to industry tariffs, whatever, they ALL do it. Free Markets are a myth.

I just think every Co. should be treated equally, no doubt many governments make extra efforts for their "own" companies, but it does not make it right.

Think of how different we treat our OWN companies in the United States, if we treated them all equally, then forget ever affording tickets on commercial airlines(subsidized by the government), or Microsoft SHOULD have been broken up, like AT&T. Either way, whether its morally right or not doesn't really matter, its within a government's power to regulate trade and commerce, if you want to do business in their jurisdiction, follow the rules or get slapped.

The power vacuum in that market would be amusing.

the war is over and PC clones won.

chips, they use the same intel chips as pc clones. IT people call these boxes Wintels.

And I thought it missed its mark because PowerPC or Intel X86,
Microsoft still hasn't won anything in the Mac market besides
those copies of Office that they sell; there's no "Win" in
"Mactel", just the same MacOS/X that many of us already know
and love.

Tesha

rather than the United States.

We (the US) were well on our way to the same conclusion
until Bush was elected and directed that Microsoft be
let off.

Tesha

Because computers are integral in every area of life today, using them is necessary for the economic wellbeing of millions of people worldwide. Because software is platform dependent and Windows is in such widespread use, developers are essentially forced to develop their applications for Windows in many environments, especially bespoke software. Because developers are so often forced to write for a Windows platform, there is a great deal of Windows-based software in use and many businesses are required to use Windows software and by extension Windows to interact properly with their clients.

Its a big fat feedback loop that works very much to MS benefit and many people are helpless participants of it. Which is why, as the Halloween memos reveal, Microsoft are seriously concerned about the open-source movement and Linux. In any event, as I understand it, there _are_ antitrust laws in the US, they're just not applied as often. Nor are they as strong. Certainly the issue of whether MS is a monopoly has been aired in US courts and, IIRC, a lot of very clever people from the Santa Fe institute used a lot of serious math to prove that not only are they an effective monopoly but many of their business practices are essentially anti-competitive.

What is meant by "anti-competitive" is that they are gaining advantage in the marketplace _not_ through superior product, but by means that essentially leverage their monopoly to crowd out competitors. In some cases those competitors have clearly superior products, which means consumers lose out. The early versions of IE were vastly inferior quality to Netscape but MS crowded them out by bundling IE with Windows. Fine, you might say, but they gave it away for free, how does that harm the consumer? Well, MS used their operating system to leverage their browser, then added all sorts of propietory extensions that made their browser work best with their Web servers, thus encouraging people to use Microsoft web servers instead of Linux-based servers and essentially attempting to move the Web away from open standards and free server software towards proprietary MS server software, which is ultimately very detrimental to the consumer.

I'm one of those geeks who's been at it since the first home computers and I've watched MS do this over and over again. Wordperfect was a much, much better word processor than Word when that product first came out, so ask yourself why are most people using Word today? Granted, the current iteration is a fine product but to reach that stage MS actually took the everybody three steps back before moving forward again with MS at the helm.

And Word is a very good example of why the EU is currently fining MS. Competitors fought running battles with MS because their Office package used API calls to their operating system (Windows) that ultimately gave them an advantage and allowed them to achieve market dominance. API calls that they kept secret from other product developers. On an operating system that some very smart people have demonstrated is undeniably occupies a monopoly position. i.e. There's no feasable way to compete in the same market (which is why free OS's and open source are such a threat, being the only way to eliminate dominance). In the case of Netscape, they did something far more obviously scandalous, putting code into a release of Windows that actually broke Netscape browsers.

When antitrust laws are applied like the EU is currently applying them, they're stimulating competition and doing consumers a favour. People that can't see that, in my view, don't understand the theory being applied and the factual history of the effects of monopolies generally and MS business practices in particular.

Like USB. How many different kinds of connectors do you think we would be using today if MS had not supported USB development? USB 2.0 is awesome btw, puts firewire to shame.

Your totally right about wordperfect and netscape, they were much better initially that the MS products.

(Not My Area Of Expertise)

I thought USB was around for a few years in PC's before Apple adopted it, and then it took off. But maybe I've been drinking the cider.

this body included Apple Computers, Lucent Technologies, and Microsoft along with others.

Certainly not in terms of processor utilization for
equivalent data bandwidth.

Tesha

if your using a mac the firewire is faster because their usb drivers suck. On a pc the usb is faster. Usb also supplies currrent to charge devices.

You're missing my point.

Firewire hardware supports DMA (Direct Memory Access),
offloading the processor. USB doesn't, putting the
processor right in the middle of all of those data
transfers and keeping the processor from doing other,
more-useful work.

Tesha

You are correct. Fire wire uses PtP arch. and USB uses "master-slave" architecture. Nevertheless, USB offers more compatibility than firewire.

that equals $355,697,800 in actual money.

:headbang:
rocknation

I would take the Euro over the US $, since it is slowly being trampled by the overall effects of the Bush war machine.