EU is not fine for Microsoft

The European Union has fined Microsoft $ 1.4 billion for failing to comply with sanctions imposed on it for alleged anti-competitive behavior. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but this strikes even me as unfair. The EU says Microsoft is "guilty" of excluding rival products such as media players and web browsers from its operating system. This is just the kind of crazy ruling you get when you allow bureaucrats who do not understand technology and who have never had to earn a living in a competitive commercial environment to make decisions about what businesses can or cannot do.

Microsoft responded to the EU demands by producing a version of Windows without a media player. Nobody bought it. Including IE as a part of Windows has actually been a benefit to software developers, allowing them to use it in their own software. That's what operating systems are for: to provide a platform that supports applications. IE was simply a component.

But the argument that linking Internet Explorer with Windows squeezed out rival web browsers is absolute nonsense. Something like 30% of the visitors to Tech-Pro.net use Firefox, a web browser that is not included with Windows. The reason other web browsers have not flourished in the Windows environment is probably because they were slow, crash-prone junk, like Netscape, or just didn't offer enough to make people want to pay for them, like Opera.

As for media players, well RealPlayer is a piece of bloatware that slows your system to a crawl, and QuickTime steals most of your multimedia file associations and doesn't feel like a Windows application. Perhaps that's why they weren't successful.

If the EU wanted to do something to help level the playing field in the software business it might want to look at fining hardware manufacturers for not producing drivers for anything but the latest version of Windows. This forced obsolescence of old but still perfectly serviceable hardware really is a scandal. But asking businesses to do things it is not in their commercial interest to do is a dubious thing for governments to be doing. They should be encouraging success, since that's what makes countries prosperous (and ultimately pays their salaries and inflation-proofed pensions.)

One practical way the EU could help other players in the software market is to practise what it preaches, and actually use the products it complains Microsoft has an unfair advantage over. It could use Linux on its own systems instead of Windows, and then make the provision of Linux hardware drivers a condition of its procurement contracts, thereby resolving one obstacle to greater use of Linux - limited hardware support. It could use other office software than Microsoft Office, thereby helping to ensure that Office document formats do not become a de-facto standard.

Microsoft is successful because it's products are what people (and EU government departments) buy, even though they know they have a choice in the matter. And only a bureaucrat who hasn't the slightest clue about what life is like in the private sector could imagine that creating products that give customers what they want is a crime worthy of serious punishment.

« H4cked! | Home | Linux one month on »