Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Confused

I find it rather odd that the EU have just fined Microsoft £630 million for breaking EU competition law (from the people who refuse to let dissent be shown in the Parliament...).

Today's penalty was for breaches of EU competition policy dating back to March 2004. The company was fined for charging "unreasonable" prices for access to crucial software information to enable its rivals to operate in a market dominated by Microsoft.

When I worked in Brussels, and even before I changed my computer here to a Mac the only software we were allowed to use was Microsoft. It does rather confuse me. If it's so bad, why do they spend millions and millions on their products? And their fines to the EU, I presume (even though it's people across the EU who would have suffered but what do they get back, eh? fuck all, just their money spend on EU propaganda so the EU can have more money) that they would at least use some of it buying microsoft products.

5 comments:

RobW said...

We Europlebs are just too ignorant to understand the grand decisions of our Euromasters...

Vindico said...

The 'cost' of fines will simply be borne by consumers. Microsoft will either add this cost to the price of their products, pay people less, pay less dividends, pay less corporation tax to national governments etc. So it is a very handy method of raising money. More indirect taxation.

malpas said...

The fine is over a billion dollars and was in large part because microsoft persisted in exploiting its market position by overcharging rivals who wanted to use its code to make software.

Anonymous said...

I suspect it probably has something to do with anti-Americanism...

Mark Wadsworth said...

Yeah, but Microsoft are shit so I couldn't care less.