said by Ahrenl :

They want a piece of M$'s cash cow. They don't want proper documentation, they just had to make a ridiculous demand that M$ would never comply with so they can start levying fees.

said by chemaupr :

Sure I can, I read about it almost weekly in zdent... sometimes you just want to hear other pepole opinions and not necesarly post yours... and by the way what is yours,,, if you have read anything yet!!! or should we give you more time?

said by TK Junk Mail :

The steps being ordered now are nothing but attempts to drive MS out of business.

said by Desdinova :

"Microsoft has the worst documentation on interoperability of their products of any of the software vendors we work with."

So don't work with it. If there's a financial reason for you to continue working with MS-based products, that's your decision, just as it is to dump them and walk away. If you have a licensing agreement with MS where they're guaranteed to provide a product that maixmizes your profits without giving a percentage back, then you might have a valid claim.

said by Desdinova :

"Microsoft has the worst documentation on interoperability of their products of any of the software vendors we work with."

So don't work with it. If there's a financial reason for you to continue working with MS-based products, that's your decision, just as it is to dump them and walk away. If you have a licensing agreement with MS where they're guaranteed to provide a product that maixmizes your profits without giving a percentage back, then you might have a valid claim.

If MS were to lose significant amounts of revenue because of their practices, then I suspect they'd change them. The fact that they're not, seems to suggest that most folks don't have a problem with them.

Am I a MS apologist? Not at all. I use them by default; for the work I do, Windows-based software and hardware is less expensive and more diversified than what's available on other platforms. I was a die-hard Amiga freak who finally gave up the ghost when I could no longer perform certain tasks that were easily available on a Windows-based platform. I certainly did NOT sue MS and try to force them to engineer their gear to integrate with my Amiga stuff. Using this same logic, I don't see the validity of the EU's claims. If so many countries have problems with MS, let 'em dump the system and go with something else.

"In your myopic world, any company that is large and american should get a free pass to do what they please, when they please, how they please..."

I don't feel that American products should be given a free pass, any more than many foreign companies are given a free pass here in the states. Look at the car industry for example, and all the modifications that are necessary or a foreign car to be U.S. compliant.

Personally, I'm a big fan of Mexican switchblades, French absinthe and Cuban cigars, but guess what? Because I live in the United States...

said by Titus Pullo :

Furthermore, imagine -- if you're able -- what computing would be today if true competition had existed for the past fifteen years.

said by Titus Pullo :

any company as rich as microsoft didn't get there playing by the rules, and that's a fact.

said by PGHammer :

You are implying that to be successful that a company *must* break the rules.

said by trparky :

Microsoft should just say..."You know, fine. If you don't like us that badly, we'll just pull out. Lets see you get by without Windows. Bet that the IT industry in Europe will crash if that happens."

said by trparky :

My idea is that if the European people have such an issue with Microsoft and that they want to fine Microsoft as much as they want to, then they should just pull out.

Microsoft should just say..."You know, fine. If you don't like us that badly, we'll just pull out. Lets see you get by without Windows. Bet that the IT industry in Europe will crash if that happens."

Oh yeah, I know, they can turn to Linux, but not suddenly. There would have to be a huge transition period in which companies and people would have to transition to Linux. It wouldn't be easy at all, transitioning an entire country and its people away from software that they are used to using would be a nightmare to say the least.

EC vs. MS: IT depts find a champ in Europe

By Andrew Orlowski (andrew.orlowski@theregister.co.uk)
Published Wednesday 12th July 2006 20:14 GMT

AnalysisThe European Commission has scored the most meaningful victory in 15 years of litigation against Microsoft on both sides of the Atlantic.

It's not the fine itself. In financial terms, that's just a tiny dink on the back bumper - and barely a surface scratch. Microsoft can repay the $350m punishment in about as long as it takes a mature Windows XP laptop installation to resume from sleep: it's about three day's revenue for Redmond, which expects to make a $19bn profit this year.

Instead, it's the cause of penalty that should give at least one important part of the IT market plenty to think about. The EC is determined that Microsoft document its obscure server technology, and do so seriously enough for third parties to interoperate on level terms - and give the marketplace some renewed competition.

That narrows the scope considerably. So the ruling doesn't affect home users, who will see next to no impact. Business practices such as bundling and integration, and OEM contracts, all of which have featured prominently in past antitrust cases, aren't at issue, either. Real Networks, which like Novell was a key witness at one stage, has since settled with Redmond. No, this is purely about enterprise interop.

Microsoft calls its server technology its "crown jewels", but in fact, what's it's protecting is more paste than precious stone. At the core of what Microsoft protects most dearly is some unremarkable late 1980s technology based on Microsoft's implementation of DCE/RPC - which had its roots in the Unix wars of the time. Sharing files and printers, and basic network operations such as adding members - all of which are commodity functions. We're not talking about advanced file system features such as replication, let alone WinFS.

Microsoft was ordered to document the protocols in 2004, and its failure to produce adequate documentation resulted in the imposition of the fine today.

"I find it difficult to imagine that a company like Microsoft does not understand the principles of how to document protocols in order to achieve interoperability," an exasperated Neelie Kroes, the EC competition minister, said today.

Of course a commercial vendor can license the protocols, and hope for the best. In Luxembourg recently, Microsoft was keen to show that this could result in a happy collaboration. But it's difficult to compete effectively with the finished result - and impossible for an open source implementation to agree to the license conditions.

The key question now is who can benefit from the documentation Microsoft has failed to produce - and here the spotlight falls on software libre.

Before the court of the first instance, Samba's Andrew Tridgell held up that mythical device, the appliance server, as an example of the innovation that could return to the enterprise server business. But that isn't the kind of innovation that matters to IT users at this end of the business. It's rare to hear IT managers wishing for server appliances - but it's hard not to find one who didn't wish for reduced complexity. Opening the guts of Microsoft's software business is really about lowering prices, which are maintained at an artificially high level because of a monopoly supplier, for some very basic computer functionality.

The downstream effect could - and really ought to - concentrate minds at Redmond on Plan A, which was always about replicating functions found in expensive proprietary Unix systems and midrange systems and putting them on lower cost volume PCs. In recent years, it's been Linux that has been humming this tune.

All computer companies expect features to be