“Microsoft suffered a decisive antitrust defeat in Europe on Monday, sending its shares down 2 percent in pre-market trade,; David Lawsky and Michele Sinner report for Reuters.
MacDailyNews Take: Lawsky and Sinner report on Microsoft. How apropos.
Lawsky and Sinner continue, “A European Union court backed a European Commission ruling that Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, illegally abused its market power to crush competitors. Europe’s top competition regulator said the ruling could lead to a ‘significant drop’ in Microsoft’s 95 percent market share.”
Lawsky and Sinner report, “‘Its clearly a major defeat for Microsoft. There is no doubt it will spur the Commission on to regulate Microsoft much more significantly,’ said Chris Bright, a British competition lawyer. ‘They will find that future innovation by Microsoft will be hampered quite significantly.'”
MacDailyNews Take: Hamper what? Microsoft innovation is an oxymoron.
Lawsky and Sinner continue, “The court upheld a record 497 million euro ($689.9 million) fine imposed on the company as part of the original decision… More importantly, it endorsed Commission sanctions against Microsoft’s tying together of software and refusal to give rival makers of office servers information to enable their products to work smoothly with Windows.”
“Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith was downbeat in speaking to reporters at the courtroom, promising the company would obey the ruling in full. He said there was no decision yet on whether to appeal to the European Court of Justice,” Lawsky and Sinner report.
“Since the original decision, the Commission has fined Microsoft a further 280.5 million euros, saying it had failed to comply with the interoperability sanction. The EU regulator is considering a further fine for non-compliance,” Lawsky and Sinner report.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “The Dude” and “RadDoc” for the heads up.]
The EU Court decision is an historic one. It ends the validity of the dubious idea that deliberately hiding your API, worst, making public nurtured versions of your internal APIs, deriding the very concept of “standard” and act so to trap your customers into mediocre solutions making it hard to use and adopt better alternatives constitutes a legal and acceptable business model.
If Microsoft will be reduced to compete on quality of software technology it is doomed to failure: IBM history repeating.
Alot of articles are referring to Apple and Google as having their own monopolies and therefore will be affected too.
Not true. Microsoft has not been hit on by the EU because it is the monopoly, but because of their actions and behaviour towards others.
Apple and Google will be completely unaffected because the do not act to thwart innovation by others, or deliberately act only to protect their hegemony.
Great decision, good for everyone who wants to see improvements in computing.
Government intervention into business never solves a damn thing.
Yeah, just like the AT&T;breakup didn’t change a thing.
Unfortunately, MS can pay the fines frorm petty cash.
If the EU really is serious about punishing Microsoft, they’ll dictate to all gov bodies that Microsoft servers must make up no more than 50% of a government agencies infrastructure and that all gov bodies must use Office products that support industry standard file formats (which eliminates MS Office).
But, unfortunately (except for China), the governments of the world sit back and say “bad Microsoft. Here pay this fine” and continue to let Microsoft dominate every part of the IT industry.
What the heck are people yelling about?
The biggest headache is how to let people play WIndows games.
Aside from that, everything else is fixed.
OS X
Linux
OpenOfficeOrg
Google Hosted Applications
iWork
IMAP
SQL
XML
PDF
Etc. etc. etc.
Yes, the issue is not whether a company is a monopoly or not.
It is whether they did CRIMINAL THINGS as a monopoly.
Microsoft was criminal because it forced us to suffer lousy user interfaces. Hahaha. Funny but true!
Hey Dug…
Your comments are hilarious.
…they [EU] still want the US as friends, as we them.
“But then again the Europeans are our good friends and we them. They just want to be friends and not OS slaves to Uncle Sam’s spies in the machine.”
You sure are delusional. After experiencing all the anti-global comments, the turning of the back on democracy, the descent into terrorism, the illegal war, the war crimes against humanity etc. etc. that has come out of AENUS (Australia, England ‘n United States) over the last few years I seriously doubt you have any “friends” left anywhere else.
Doug: This is just “Euro power” speaking here, they need to find some way to get back the billions they foolishly gambled on Microsoft when they are perfectly able to develop their own operating system.
Doesn’t play a role. You’re alone on a wild tangent with no connection to reality.
By the way: Linux is largely a european project.
MuzoInOz: Microsoft will just file all of it previous “business” practices as protected IP and then there is no way the courts will jump on them. Sorry, IP rights work like that.
No, they don’t. Not in Europe, anway.
Trivial patents and especially ones purely related to software are much more difficult to get over here than in the US.
max Walker: Let’s hope the fine was in Euros and the cost to Redmond will be more ( given the slump in the dollar ) now than if it had paid up smartly.
From the article: The court upheld a record 497 million euro ($689.9 million) fine
Thanks ping for pointing out Linux to Doug but I think you are wasting time. AENUS has become so full of itself, they would not recognize a product as being European even if it was standing off their shores with a big torch raised in it’s hand. They certainly have forgotten the meaning of liberty, descending into their pseudo terroristic rage, they are like a mad dog…bitting the hand that freed them.
I do appreciate the effort. I wonder how many yanks will stop using Linux now that they realized it’s (gasp) not part of AENUS.