[Ecommerce] Re: [A2k] Wall Street Journal editorial: Microsoft's Waterloo

[Georg C. F. Greve]

--
On Tue, 18 Sep 2007 11:31:53 +0200
Thiru Balasubramaniam <thiru@keionline.org> wrote:

 tb> All of which suggests this could get out of hand faster than the
 tb> click of a mouse. Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, points
 tb> out that Apple's iPod dominates the MP3 player market, in which
 tb> Microsoft's Zune is the underdog, and that Google's search engine
 tb> has whipped Microsoft's MSN and all other comers.  Not to mention
 tb> the near-monopoly in some mainframe-computer markets held by IBM,
 tb> which joined Sun Microsystems in pushing Brussels to take on
 tb> Microsoft in 1998. Mr.  Smith seems to be implying that two can
 tb> play at this game of making "strategic complaints."

Seems that WSJ echoes the Microsoft echo chamber spin. There are also
fundamental misconceptions and misunderstandings of fact apparent in
this article. Here are some:

Antitrust law is not about dominating positions, but about *ABUSE* of
such positions. This is an obvious attempt at trying to distract from
the decision by pointing fingers at others -- but those others did
nothing to leverage those positions into neighboring markets, AFAIK.

The WSJ also misses the point that in both parts of this case, it was
the actual innovator that was vanquished through abusive behaviour by
Microsoft.

The workgroup server market was created by Novell.

The streaming media marker was created by Real.

So this was a dominant player killing off the innovators through abusive
behaviour, creating an environment in which innovation is being punished
and/or threatened.

One of the questions that people applying for venture capital around
Silicon Valley get asked routinely is: "What would happen to you if
Microsoft decided to push into your market?" and if it becomes clear
they could not defend themselves, they will not get money. This is a
situation in which innovation is hampered at the expense of society.

Virtually every antitrust investigation found market failure in the
technology industry, but usually was politically incapable of
establishing effective remedies, e.g. the US, where the wind was taken
out of the sails when the Bush administration came into power and the
recent evaluation in the US unsurprisingly found the token remedies to
be entirely ineffective.

The European Commission deserves praise for a very thorough and fair
investigation, and seemingly endless patience with Microsoft exhibiting
blatant abuse and disregard of the EC and ECJ.

The only change the European Court of Justice made to the EC decision
was on the trustee provision: They effectively said the Commission was
too forthcoming with Microsoft by allowing them to suggest trustees and
picking one as an independent third party.

And yes, the same ground rules should apply to all companies.

Regards,
Georg

--
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve@fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
What everyone should know about DRM                   (http://DRM.info)
--
[ Content of type application/pgp-signature deleted ]