Microsoft to EU: You win, we'll change

by Brad Linder Oct 22nd 2007

After nine years, Microsoft has given up its fight against European Union regulators. Essentially, the EU says Microsoft is a monopoly, and as such should take certain measures to give consumers more options and open up its source code a tiny bit to enable interoperability with third party software.

Microsoft has decided not to appeal the latest EU court ruling, which means the company will fork over $705 million which had been sitting in an escrow account since since the fine was levied in 2004.

Other highlights of the agreement include:

Microsoft will allow third party companies to license non-patented technology to ensure interoperability with Windows
Companies will only have to pay a one-time €10,000 fee for that intellectual property, not an ongoing royalty

In return, the EU is removing its hit from Microsoft's head. In other words, no more fines against the company until the next time it tries to do something incredibly anti-competitive, like (hypothetically) engineering an operating system that plays well with Microsoft Office but not so well with competing software suites like OpenOffice.org.

Tags: anti-trust, antitrust, Europe, European-Union, Microsoft

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Gardiner Westbound said 4:10PM on 10-22-2007

Microsoft undoubtedly raked in far more than the legal costs and $705 million penalty during the nine years it waltzed the EU court.

michael said 5:12PM on 10-22-2007

Oh yeah, a monopoly where people can also buy OS X, get Linux for free, and other choices.

That's definitely a monopoly that has controlled all our computer. I really hope those Microsoft fines help with your mini-tea parties there.

(sarcasm)

kdmurray said 8:07AM on 10-23-2007

I wanted to post a comment here about this... but the response ended up so long that I wrote a post about it. In short though, this smacks of government interference.

In a day and age where the percentage of Microsoft instances on home computers is as low as it's been in a decade, and falling with more Mac and Linux PCs sold each day, it doesn't make sense to stomp all over the intellectual property rights of companies.

I'm no Microsoft fanboy, hell I'm writing this on my macbook while setting up an Ubuntu Server, but I do believe an action like this is unfair to the company and will do little to benefit consumers in the long run.

Jano said 8:51AM on 10-23-2007

@Michael: tell that to the companies whose products depend on unreleased APIs from Microsoft. Fair play is not "I sell oranges you are free to sell something else or go bankrupt".

Jano said 8:52AM on 10-23-2007

Michael: tell that to the companies whose products depend on unreleased APIs from Microsoft. Fair play is not "I sell oranges you can sell something else or go bankrupt".

michael said 5:05PM on 10-23-2007

@Jano : Nobody told them they have to use Windows :)

They could have chosen Linux or OS X to do the job. But obviously, they, and the market, prefers Windows.

James said 5:27PM on 10-23-2007

[PS: Not to mention, who the hell says, "Your API isn't robust enough, I'm going to sue you!"?]

James said 5:28PM on 10-23-2007

Can anybody give me an actual - concrete! - example of one of these "unreleased APIs" for Windows? As a software developer who normally targets the Windows platform, I've never run into a situation where I said "boy, I wish I could do X, but MS just won't let me!". It's always been a matter of just looking hard enough for the function, which always turns out to have been right there in MSDN, waiting for me to find it. What are these people trying to do with Windows that they can't figure out on their own?

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