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Blogged date : 2007 Jan 29
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/26/HNrivalsslamvista_1.html
As Microsoft Corp. gears up for the consumer
launch of Vista, rivals slammed the new product, claiming that it
breaks the very same European antitrust laws that its operating-system
predecessor, XP, fell foul of in 2004, and that it will be riddled with
bugs.
"Microsoft has chosen to ignore the fundamental
principles of the Commission’s March 2004 decision," said Simon Awde,
chairman of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) in
a statement Friday, adding that the new product goes even further, by
leveraging its desktop dominance to compete on the Internet.
ECIS filed a
formal complaint about Vista to the European Commission's antitrust
division a year ago. The Commission said at the time that it would
examine the complaint carefully. That examination is understood to be
still ongoing, however Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd wasn't
immediately available to comment.
On Friday the ECIS described Vista as "the first step in Microsoft's strategy to extend its market dominance to the Internet." Microsoft’s XAML markup language inside Vista was designed to replace HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), an industry standard used for publishing material online, it claimed.
XAML is designed to be dependent on Windows, and therefore not interoperable with other systems, ECIS said.
In addition, Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 will introduce the Open XML file format called OOXML in a move to replace the ODF industry standard.
My problem with issues like this is that they sound good however, they are bad for business. I don't know these ECIS people in Europe, but they have no right to run around and attempt to controls features in products. I have a fundamental problem with it. If MS wants to put a feature or not put a feature into their product, it is based on whether or not the marketplace will accept the product. Their dominance in the marketplace is based on the fact that their customers are paying for the products, nothing more.
