The EU, in its infinite wisdom, is evidently set to open up a couple of new fronts in its never-ending battle with Microsoft. Not a great use of taxpayer money.
Lets take these one a time. First Opera’s complaint.
Microsoft is alleged to have engaged in illegal tying of its Internet Explorer product to its dominant Windows operating system. The complaint alleges that there is ongoing competitive harm from Microsoft’s practices, in particular in view of new proprietary technologies that Microsoft has allegedly introduced in its browser that would reduce compatibility with open internet standards, and therefore hinder competition.
Opera, the little browser that couldn’t. I am here working in a Firefox browser window, with a Flock instance open on my second screen for email search and calendar. According to most estimates Firefox’s share of the market is growing. In some European geographies it is 25% of the market. IE is on the back foot. Alternative browsers can and are successfully competing in the market.
So what about Office?
Microsoft is alleged to have illegally refused to disclose interoperability information across a broad range of products, including information related to its Office suite, a number of its server products, and also in relation to the so called .NET Framework. The Commission’s examination will therefore focus on all these areas, including the question whether Microsoft’s new file format Office Open XML, as implemented in Office, is sufficiently interoperable with competitors’ products.
But it seems like everything works with Office these days. Google Docs does an amazing job of opening and saving Microsoft Office files (even presos). OpenOffice ditto. Any number of smaller startups work pretty seamlessly with MS docs (notably Zoho). The market is so locked down to competitors that Adobe has just decided to play. I know the ODF crowd would spit at the assertion that some barriers to competition have been sidelined. Its true third parties have to reverse engineer compatibility – but they seem pretty damned good at it.
From a pragmatic perspective it seems to me the Office market is more competitive than it has been for a long time. IBM, for example, now offers a free suite called Symphony.
The EU could possibly do with a crash course in XML. The whole point of all these hundreds of millions of dollars spent on XML and XML tooling these last few years has been to enable translation. Translation between different languages. Look at the EU. It doesn’t mandate a single language, does it, that everyone has to interoperate with? The EU has 23 official languages. You want to translate from German to French – knock yourself out.
The world is changing. Documents today are not static. They flow through networks, largely enabled by a bunch of web standards. Some companies choose to go end to end Microsoft, for its “integrated innovation”. Other companies choose to go a non-Microsoft route to avoid integrated aggravation. That’s choice.
Today it is primarily dorks that use alternatives to Microsoft Office- but that is not to these future dwellers don’t represent a likely future. Lets also bear in mind that complex macro users are somewhat of a edge case (macros are one of the things that don’t translate well).
If the EU wanted to be truly effective in the area of doc formats and so on perhaps it should mandate a “single language” – that is a single document format. Its called market pressure. To be fair all its doing is announcing investigations made at the behest of complaints from Opera and ECIS (otherwise known as the Anyone But Microsoft lobbying club). In other words these investigations may lead nowhere.
But from my perspective is hugely disappointing the EU would add this noise to the signal. Just a few weeks came the outstanding news that hell was becoming all frosty: Microsoft and SAMBA had agreed a deal.
update: Apparently the FT largely agrees:
Microsoft’s opponents suspect it wants to extend its dominant platform to the internet and that it will try to do so by controlling standards. But it may not succeed. Nimbler rivals such as Google already have applications running on the internet. Microsoft’s efforts to set international standards for a new version of Office have hit opposition from governments too. If the market forces the company to open up, then EU action may not be needed.
Second, should the Commission’s inquiry uncover evidence of unfair practice, then going on a prosecutorial rampage should be a last resort. That would add only to lawyers’ billable hours. Remedies may again be hard to enforce and rendered irrelevant by product evolution.
There are signs Microsoft is ready to respond to a flexible and diplomatic approach. The company’s reaction to the investigation has been to stress its co-operation. That is a good omen. It shows that Microsoft has learnt from experience. The company has every incentive to placate the competition regulator. Negotiation could yield results. The Commission’s goal is to make software markets more competitive. Its inquiry should be forward looking and not just rake over the past.
picture courtesy of malias on Flickr under a creativecommons 2.0 license.
Microsoft is a client.
ned says:
January 15, 2008 at 10:28 pm
I thought it did mandate a single document format – ODF. It’s ISO approved and so is the “single language” you mention. The only problem is convincing MS to agree.
Gary says:
January 16, 2008 at 10:36 am
James..
Spot-on Mr G.
Although..
The EU does limit the languages in which it conducts its own business – English, French and German
And… I’m very doubtful of the stats that give FF a 25% market share in Europe – 25% is a good deal higher than the consensus which is around 14%.
ned..
ODF isn’t “mandated” by the EU (yet) – although there are encouraging signs that several EU countries are adopting it (Italy, France, Spain, Norway).
Jon Collins says:
January 17, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Cracking post James, a bit of common sense is very welcome in this whole debate. And I’m not just saying that because I agree with you – rather because you see both sides, rather than picking one or the other.
Cheers, Jon
jgovernor says:
January 17, 2008 at 2:52 pm
thanks very much Jon – nice to know i am not bonkers. i did partly expect to get hammered for this one.
Gary – good one. i think the three official language argument actually supports my argument. which is lucky.
Ned- the EU doesn’t actually mandate ODF.
Thinkovation says:
January 17, 2008 at 5:27 pm
The EU and Microsoft – Another investigation or two……
The EU has recently announced two new anti-trust investigations against Microsoft. The first is the result of a complaint by European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) in which ECIS alleges that Microsoft has illegally refused to provide inte…
Flock rocks - and Microsoft is not going to take over the world. Deal with it. « Total Immersion says:
January 17, 2008 at 9:37 pm
[…] “You need Flock,” he said, a statement I promptly forgot until I saw it mentioned in an article by James Governor earlier today. That’s when I saw it, not when he wrote […]
Dalibor Topic says:
January 18, 2008 at 3:56 pm
I’d disagree, and point out that Microsoft desperately needs an incentive to change its corporate culture away from the current ‘must kill all humans’ crop. Anti-trust lawsuits are a great way to generate that incentive externally from the company, as long as its leadership is incapable of doing do.
Given that the EU had to literally force Microsoft to open up specs to Samba, for example, I’d say that Microsoft is still culturally incapable of coexistence, so those wishing to coexist with them in a web of standards have little choice but to use the tools the law gives them to attach a price to Microsoft’s predatory behavior, where the market has been prevented from doing so.
jgovernor says:
January 21, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Hey Dalibor – thanks for the feedback. i would argue Microsoft’s corporate culture has already changed a lot. The fact is – it now no longer only has one culture. Are there some old fashioned monopolists at the company? absolutely. but are there forces for change, and interoperability – absolutely there are. see Port25
Dalibor Topic says:
January 23, 2008 at 11:31 am
Oh, no doubt about it, there are good people working for change everywhere, even at Microsoft … but I don’t really see any of them attaining any position of power within Microsoft as long as the current business model generates soaring, excellent revenue. And that it does, all the wishful open source slow-mo world domination hopes aside.
So while coexistence is the new way of life for open source, now that it’s become mainstream, and turning the hot war into a cold one has some benefits to Microsoft, too, any attempt to turn Microsoft around must involve reducing Microsoft’s bottom line, or it won’t work in a corporate culture where XBox’ 1B+ USD failures are written off as peanuts.
Since the market is not capable of changing itself, or being changed by actors within the market, for the benefit of the future leaner, customer serving and efficient Microsoft, the change must come from outside the market, in form of regulative actions.
So, yeah, for the good of Microsoft, more bitter medicine, please. I’d hate to see it cling on to the predatory style of life while reinforcing an internal story of an ABM conspiracy being out there to victimize them.
That didn’t work so well for Serbia under Milosevic, so I doubt it will for Microsoft, either.