MS standards not acceptable
EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes upped the ante in her battle against Microsoft (MS) in a speech in which she strongly recommended that European governments and businesses should use software based on open standards.
The Kroesade (sorry, can’t resist a bad pun) against MS over the past four years for violating European competition rules and for defying the judgements of the European Commission (EC) has left the company with a tab for €1.676 billion ($2.60bn), and counting.
Assuming the company is discounting and has calculated that lawyers’ fees are substantially less than the sum in question will earn in MS’s hands, there may well be no time limit on how long the company continues to defy the EC. Hence, possibly, Kroes’s renewed assault.
MS is already the target of two more antitrust investigations, and has recently announced that the Office 2007 suite, currently using MS’s version (OOXML) of Extensible Markup Language, will support Open Document Format (ODF) in Office 2007 Service Pack 2 in the first half of 2009.
The concession has not assuaged Kroes’s anger. She said a single, dominant software supplier posed serious security concerns for governments and businesses. “I know a smart business decision when I see one,” she added. “Choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed.”
Other standards cases investigated by the commission include the operations of mobile phone company Qualcomm over licensing terms and chip technology group Rambus over the use of the use of certain patents for DRAM chips, but there was no question who Kroes was talking about.
Summing it up, Kroes said when the market leads to a particular proprietary technology becoming the de facto standard, and the technology owner exploits that power, then “the competition authority has to recreate the conditions of competition that would have emerged from a properly carried out standardisation process.”
