InsideMicrosoft

Neelie Kroes Goes Ballistic

Miss Kroes goes bananas again, saying Microsoft didn’t do enough to share source code with its competitors.
Microsoft faces a 2.34 million dollar a day fine for not complying with European antitrust obligations.

Today’s papers in Belgium quote following statements :

“I have given Microsoft every opportunity to comply with its obligations. However, I have been left with no alternative other than to proceed via the formal route to ensure Microsoft’s compliance,” said EU Antitrust Commissioner Neelie Kroes.

To which Microsoft replied, stating new (updated & expanded) documents had been handed in already :

“In the interest of due process, we think it would have been reasonable for the Commission and the Trustee at least to read and review these new documents before criticizing them as being insufficient,” Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said in a statement.

The EU Commission said it based its decision on a report by the monitoring trustee of the 2004 agreement, which said that competitors seeking to operate with Microsoft software “would be wholly and completely unable to proceed on the basis of the documentation.”

Dear Miss Kroes :

It is quoted in the report you refer to that “the technical documentation is therefore totally unfit at this stage for its intended purpose.”

Microsoft isn’t an open-source community. They make money from source code they developed. If you were to apply this way of thinking to any other product, you’d even make a bigger fool of yourself than you do now.

If I have a recipe for delicious cookies, and I have a large market for it, would you make me go public with this recipe so that other companies can make the same cookies and make money with that too? Then if you give me a fine like you made Microsoft pony up, you would still be mad if I then published what kind of ingredients I used, without telling how much of each exactly? Apparently yes.

Time to go after Coca-Cola, don’t you think?

How typically European. Yada-yada-yada, we smell cash.

Nobody in Europe wanted a Windows ‘N’. The first thing you do is download a WinMedia player if by any chance you accidentally would have the ‘N’ version, and not some ad-stuffed other boring freeware player. In addition to WinMedia, people use WinAmp, some use Real. These players can exist next to eachother on the same desktop without any problem.

When are you going to sue Real for spreading .rm files? I can’t open them in my WinMediaPlayer. That smells like another monopoly to go after, doesn’t it?

I don’t know of ANY store that sells Windows ‘N’ versions, because no clear-thinking customer wants that. You’re so full of crap.

Do something useful with my tax money instead of wasting it to issues like this. Thank you !

Update : BusinessWeek has a rather large article on this blah-blah

December 23rd, 2005 Posted by Coolz0r | General | 2 comments