The EU court decision to uphold the fines and un-bundle media player is a deep blow to Microsoft's credibility and creates friction against their Phase II Lex-Lutherian world domination plan.
It follows two weeks after ISO sent Microsoft's ignominious & fraudulent document format standard, OOXML, packing to a ballot-resolution process next Feb.
Among the more interesting details, EU officials had compared Microsoft's strategy of offering thousands of pages of "documentation" in both the ISO and anti-competition appeal instances to a "denial-of-service attack" (with the intent of paralyzing any authoritative attempts to advise adjustment or certify compliance)...basically gumming up the works while superficially satisfying the censure demanding the publication of application programming interfaces. Accordingly, the EU establishes herein its capacity to see through technical software gamesmanship -- a particularly bad habit of Microsoft's -- and there will be little patience for it going forward, not only in Microsoft's case.
Coverage today...
The New York Times | "European Court Rejects Microsoft's Antitrust Appeal" | Kevin J. O'Brien
The Financial Times | "Microsoft loses EU antitrust appeal" | Tobias Buck
Microsoft Watch (eWeek) | "Microsoft's Stunning Court Defeat" | Joe Wilcox
The Economist | "A bittersweet win over Microsoft" | staff
The Economist in particular offers this balanced view...
But Microsoft's greater concern may well be the advance of open-source software and open standards. Linux, an open-source operating system, is widely used in servers and among the technically minded but for now constitutes no threat to Windows. Firefox, an open-source browser, is used by at least one in ten instead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Windows and Office, the firm's word-processing and other applications, are the backbone of Microsoft. But increasingly the rise of online applications [and virtualization] will lessen the importance of operating systems [insert & emph. mine -Ed.] and may eventually chip away at Microsoft's dominance.
The Commission's tough line may at least offer some succour to Microsoft's rivals. But Ms Kroes's desire to see Microsoft suffer a significant drop in [market] share that Windows enjoys (95% of the world's one billion or so computers use the system) looks fanciful in the short term. Microsoft's pride may have been hurt by the court, but its dominance is hardly under immediate threat.
Begs the question: what will be Strike Three?
It won't be the ISO ballot-resolution process because I expect Microsoft's OOXML to pass there -- because the convener, Alex Brown, has stated his bias to produce a process which leans toward ACCEPTANCE, despite the fundamental problems with Microsoft owning a global document format standard.
As convenor, one of my responsibilities is to run the meeting in a such a way that it maximises the chances of approving a text.
The ODF v OOXML conflict is irrelevant anyway because neither one provides adequate technical interoperability and the conflict is a red herring (Microsoft is not gunning for ODF with OOXML, they seek to take out HTML with it).
No. Strike Three will come sooner than Feb '08 when we deliver an interoperability antidote and blow to all IT vendors seeking to constrain document interop; our solution is the key for all enterprise customers to end lock-in if they want to.
[Updated several times today...I can't say where as it will interrupt the Flow. -Ed.]
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