By Ingrid Marson, 12 May 2005 09:25
NEWS Microsoft is under growing pressure to comply with the European anti-trust ruling within a matter of weeks, an EU spokesman said on Wednesday.
The European Commission's competition spokesman said that if the matter is not resolved soon, it may fine Microsoft a significant sum of money.
"Our patience is in terms of weeks rather than months," said the spokesman. "They've had over a year now. Microsoft knows that if they don't comply to our satisfaction we can fine them up to five percent of their [daily global] turnover every day."
He said that Microsoft was aware of the specific date by which it must comply with the ruling but the EC has decided not to publicise the date, as a "negotiation tactic".
The initial anti-trust ruling on 24 March 2004 demanded that Microsoft disclose information to rival makers of server software to enable their products to be interoperable with Windows and that it offer a version of Windows without Media Player.
The EC rejected Microsoft's proposed solution to the server interoperability in March this year, due to four concerns. One of its main objections was the high level of royalties that Microsoft had proposed, said the spokesman. "The level of royalties should reflect the degree of innovation in the product, rather than [Microsoft's] monopoly power," said the spokesman.
Although Microsoft announced last month that they had addressed the majority of the EC's concern in this area, the EC spokesman said it was still talking to the software giant "concerning the proper implementation of the interoperability remedy". There are also issues regarding the version of Windows without Media Player that are yet to be resolved, said the spokesman.
A Microsoft spokesman was unable to comment on the deadline that the EC has imposed or the companyÂ’s work towards complying with the ruling.
"I wouldn't want to talk about timing or what the dialogue is about," said the Microsoft spokesman. "We continue to work diligently and quickly to resolve the outstanding issues."
The EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes met Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the end of April to discuss the software giant's failure to comply with the ruling. Kroes said Microsoft must comply with the decision 'urgently and in full'.
Ingrid Marson writes for ZDNet UK
Comments
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1. David Wylie
The EU administration is generally held in poor regard by many of its citizens.
The preposterous and farcical ruling in the Microsoft case caps all the previous nonsense we have heard from them.
Perhaps I should demand that one of our prime defence contractors should divulge the intimate innards of its missile guidance software so that I can interface it to my Microsoft Windows XP™ software.
Microsoft publish very full information on its DLLs and their contents and, with the arrival of the .NET paradigm, I believe there is even more bit level info sloshing around the operating system bucket.
Just who are these faceless fops in Brussels that make demands that are so absurd as to be laughable? Their knowledge of modern business practice seems to be scant. Their concept of the term proprietary is suspect at best. What a shower of common little bully-boys they are proving themselves to be.
They are being goaded on by various alleged ‘competitors’ who clearly have seen the EU administrators for what they are – innocents or fools!
My sympathies lie with Microsoft and its shareholders and my view of the EU administration has sunk to an all time low!
2. Simon Bazley
What utter nonsense from the previous comment.
When Apple released the Macintosh, it also released a whole wealth of information documenting interfaces between areas of code, not lease the HFS file system format (Disk layout) and the AFS network filesharing protocol (Network Layer in the case of AppleTalk and everything from there up for AFS). That meant that any competitor could produce code that could communicate with a Mac Server or Client and could read or write to Mac disks.
Microsoft has pointedly refused to give equivalent information for any of its latter SMB protocol (NTLM and later) relating to security, with the desired intention of preventing any competitor from completely replacing or communicating with a Windows Domain or Directory Service. It has done exactly the same for its NTFS disk format with the obvios intention of making it impossible to move data easily between operating systems. Samba was the direct result of a num ber of people reverse engineering MS Network protocols and cost thousands of man hours that needen't have been spent were Microsoft open in the first place.
NTFS still only has read only support under linux, wheras ReiserFS, EXT2 (and 3?) and NFS all have versions avaliable under Windows, because they are open protocols.
When Microsft publishes its 'interoperability' standards, it generally uses a system such as Com or MSVC++ classes to allow 'interoperability' (example Outlook connectors vs MS Exchange protocol), making it neccesary to code up a supporting service, dll or device on the windows machine, rather than providing a transaprent alternative on the alien platform.
Thats not interoperability its a monopoly tie in.
If only the EU could see the same validity in Software patents and the ludicrousness of being able to patent a theoretical process without having to give a unique, inovative implementation of that process.