“Shares of Apple Computer gained as rival Microsoft Corp. faced new pressure from the European Union’s top antitrust body, which is raising concerns about the company’s new Windows operating system, Vista. Shares of Apple surged 6.1 percent to $62.29,” Reuters reports.
“The Commission said European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes had written to Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer to express worries about the company’s upcoming Vista operating system,” Reuters reports. “Apple’s Macintosh computers use Apple’s own Mac OS X operating system rather than Microsoft’s Windows… The Commission, the European Union’s top antitrust body, is concerned that Vista may package Internet search functions or software to create fixed document formats, such as the ‘pdf’ format, posing a potential threat to companies such as Google Inc. or Adobe Systems Inc. which provide similar products. ‘We are concerned about the possibility that the next Vista operating system will include various elements which are currently available separately from Microsoft or other companies,’ said Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd.”
“On Thursday, Microsoft fights to stave off fines handed down in a previous case by EU competition regulators. Microsoft is in a long-running battle with the Commission, which decided in 2004 that the world’s largest software company had abused the dominance of its Windows operating system and fined it nearly half a billion euros. Analysts also cited optimism that the delay of the Vista operating system could boost sales of Apple’s Macintosh computers in the holiday-sales-fuelled fourth quarter. ‘There’s more interest around Apple with the Vista delay,’ said Shannon Cross of Cross Research, adding that the stock has sold off heavily since the middle of January,” Reuters reports.
Full article here.
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I really never cared what you all think of me anyway.
“Oh wow, I’m somebody at this so-called Mac site, look at me, listen to meeee!!!”
Who cares, I don’t. I’m not here to educate you guys and gals.
I’m not here to make you realize you’ve all been trolled, by Apple, by MDN and by yourselves.
Well, welcome to reality, you suck.
Yea, let it sink in. People don’t like you, your a cultist.
long time lurker here.
I’d just like to clear a few things up:
I definitely agree that legislatures all over the world should keep their hands off file formats and such, but it’s important to note the the European Commissioner isn’t a legislature. It’s a group of Commissioners from various member states, and part of its remit is to take to court (generally the European Court of Justice, but also the Court of First Instance) any company that it believes is in breach of Article 81 or 82 of the EC Treaty. These articles deal with antitrust, and Art 82 is what’s important here, concerning, as it does, any ‘breach of a dominant position’. However, ‘dominant position’ is not defined, and the jurisprudence of the ECJ on the matter doesn’t help much. Market share is of course important, but other factors such as barriers to entry also effect who is and is not dominant. Also, the relevant market has to be defined – so in one sense Apple competes normally (in the general personal computer market) but in another sense it has a virtual monopoly (the OS market for Macs). The point is that it’s okay to have a dominant position, as long as that dominant position isn’t abused. Again, it’s up to the court to define what is and is not abuse.
Basically, this is why MS can be hauled in front of the ECJ for bundling native PDF support in Vista, because the Commission felt (wrongly, imho) that to do so would be unfair to Adobe because of MS’s dominance in the OS market. However, Apple are safe (so far) because a) either the Commission doesn’t know of OS X’s PDF support or b) they consider Apple not to be dominant (so have obviously looked at the overall market, not just the market for OSs on the Mac.)
There is also an aspect of realpolitik at work here. The Commission doesn’t like Microsoft at all, and people who are knowledgeable about antitrust generally feel rather sorry for Apple, having been screwed over for years by MSs unfair business practice (and some fairly asinine decisions of its own, admittedly.) However, I do think that at some point in the not too distant future, Apple’s dominance in the digital music market is going to backfire to some extent. It all depends on how Apple plays its cards.
MW: ‘gave’, as in ‘I just gave a boring lecture on EU competition law’.
You’re not a cultist, you’re just an idiot.
Jim raises an interesting point. Assuming that Vista flops and the world switches to OS X, Apple seems to be in a far more vulnerable position as far as accusations of unfair bundling is concerned, given all the Apple branded apps that come on a new machine, not least the whole iLife suite.
Users want to be able to share files with each other, and I guess this is one factor that has tended to make the OS market one that naturally tends to a monopoly.
If Vista bombs spectacularly, will Apple become the monopoly, and therefore the target of antitrust? Or is file incompatibility no longer the issue it used to be, and therefore, is it possible that multiple OSes will be able coexist with roughly equal market share in the future?
I eat socks.
Ur whole reply is nullified by the point that all applications that come with a mac are able to be deleted every single one of them!! go ahead try it, I mean you might mess up some stuff but the operating system will still work!! you try to delete internet explorer from windows and see what happens! you can’t even delete the damn thing you can only sort of turn it “off”.
P.S. I don’t want to hear the rebuttle of quicktime also because even though it is entrenched in the apple OS, the application itself can be deleted and it will not affect the OS and you then choose from the myraid of multimedia applications for the mac
If it were exclusive to M$, it wouldn’t be a Portable Document Format, now would it? Oxymoron.
I’m a fan of free speech. But I resent people who abuse their freedom to exercise it.
I refer of course to MacDude (who probably changed his name from Mac & PC Guy). I really want MDN to block his address and keep his inane ranting off these pages fo good.
Back to AAPL, I think you will find that far from having further downside, it actually has a huge upside coming. Just wait and see the markets reaction to the spew of new products we are expecting…iPhone, proper video iPod, a touchsceen iPod and ultimately an iPod combining all these things. Then consider the next steps in home entertainment and video… It is truly incredible if you can’t see that these are going to be MUCH bigger than the iPod has been to date.
And the reason for it? Apple have now done all the work in creating the base platform – OSX. They can now pour out more products and functionality while only needing to tinker with the OSX itself.
The future for Apple is crystal clear and is in stark contrast to that of MS where the opposite of everything above applies.
Andiamo Apple!
Apple shares go up after [insert poorly correlated tech news item here].
Apple shares go up after Steve Jobs got up in the morning!
Apple shares go up after World of Warcraft releases patch 1.10!!!
Apple shares go up on word that the sun will come up tomorrow. Film at 11!