357m eu Fine for Microsoft

Savatage

I'm so tired of this argument that "It's not fair, they won't share".

Maybe Ferrari should share their F1 technology to their competitors too before someone shout's "hey, no fair you're too fast"

http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzmi ... ness-print

ara3n

I don't think it has anything to do with being fair and sharing or such. It just that MS has been found in court as a Monopoly. And instead of breaking them up, they chose a different solution.

Savatage

Lawyers :evil:

unless the world's largest software company obeys a 2004 antitrust order to share technical details of its Windows operating system with rivals.

It's funny they used to break up these companies - so they can just get back together again years later. All the baby bells seem to have merged with one or two other companies since they were broken up.

This saying needs to be edited...
"Build a Better Mousetrap and the World Will Beat a Path to Your Door
But don't get too big else we'll fine you.."
O:)

Savatage

Isn't swallowing up Navision. Axapta, Solomon, Great Plains, etc and eventually coming out with one all encompassing solution a sample of wiping out the competition too?

ara3n

Yep. But think of it this way. I will give you the analogy of Rome compare to Microsoft. As rome grew bigger and bigger everybody who was inside the borders thrived from the technoligy and bussiness. Everybody outside suffered either by wars or thread of war.
The same applies to Navision, before it was a competitor. It had to fight with great plains, then a MS product. Navision goal then was to keep everything inside the db. Do not access anything (COM) etc from microsoft. But then it had to build Finsql.exe to compete in MS territory, and performance suffered on it.

Now that it's inside the Rome, (owned by MS), you see all the new technology integrations and ease of use comming to Navision.

The only question is when will MS fall as Rome did.

Alex_Chow

ara3n wrote:

The only question is when will MS fall as Rome did.

Since I recently purchase a bunch of MSFT shares, I'm gonna ahead and say never!

But seriously though, these anti-trust cases against on Microsoft is going way too far. I don't even think it's about Microsoft being a monopoly anymore, it's about how much money can I extort from Microsoft.

ara3n

deadlizard wrote:

ara3n wrote:

The only question is when will MS fall as Rome did.

Since I recently purchase a bunch of MSFT shares, I'm gonna ahead and say never!

But seriously though, these anti-trust cases against on Microsoft is going way too far. I don't even think it's about Microsoft being a monopoly anymore, it's about how much money can I extort from Microsoft.

I'm hopping that it doesn't happen soon either, cause MBS unit isn't very profitable and a breakup will hurt it. Until Dynamics is released and the 4 -5 codebaes that they are maintaing are gone, it won't be solid business.

Miklos_Hollender

I think the Rome allegory is OK. As with the historical Rome, it's not some other empire (Persian etc., in this case, the lawyers of the Department of Justice or of the EU) that means the highest danger for them, but the free-spirited tribes, which is currently the Open Source movement.

Rome managed to convince some of the tribes to protect their borders - think of Jim Hugunin and IronPython and generally the Shared Source initiative, but in the end, the tribes won.

The only thing the tribes miss is money. However, whenever there is money, they leverage it quite well - just look at how amazingly usable Ubuntu Linux became from the lousy $10M of Mark Shuttleworth... I'm using it for more than a year and I think my grandpa could use it easier than Win or Mac...

Recently, a young Belgian guy called Fabien Pickaers put together a nice little ERP system at www.tinyerp.org. Now, it's far from production quality I think, but the interesting thing is how little he had to code, because how many Open Source components are already available from object-relational mappers, form design in XML, PDF printing, graph painting, an amazing reporting engine - reports designed in MS Word, imported into OpenOffice Writer, add a few template-code for mapping data, and it's done - and so on. If somebody pours $10M into Open Source ERP development, Microsoft gonna be in trouble...

I'm not a Microsoft fan, only a C/SIDE fan. I think it's understandable. If there would be a better Open Source replacement for C/SIDE, I'd switch.

But I think Microsoft should be challenged in a free market way, not by goverment lawyers. Goverement agencies pissing into the soup of the free market because they think it would taste better that way is never fair.