More Eurotroubles on the Way for Microsoft
Well, here we go again. The European Union, not content to have already hammered
Microsoft with
all
sorts of fines and other hassles (which
Redmond
has appealed, of course), wants more. This time, "people" (we
just love
Bloomberg's
headline on this one) say that the EU is going to look into Microsoft's
dominance in the word-processing and spreadsheet games. And if "people"
say it, it must be true...right?
The EU's main beef seems to be with interoperability with productivity suites
that compete with Office -- specifically, for instance, whether Microsoft is
making it too hard for developers of, say, StarOffice to let their product handle
Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
Microsoft counters with its Office Open XML format, which was cruising through
various certification organizations on its way to becoming a standard (having
already been accepted by at least one) -- until this week, when things hit
a bit of a snag. Regardless, Microsoft says that OOXML and its thousands
of pages of documentation make it possible (if not necessarily easy, we'd hasten
to add) for developers of rival systems to create interoperability with Office
formats.
We're all for interoperability here at RCPU, and we're all for anything that
makes it easier. But we're not for excessive government intervention into anybody's
business or products -- and we're not for measures that weaken intellectual
property. So let's see what rivals have to say about Word and Excel and how
legitimate their claims seem (although we suspect there will be nothing new
under the Eurosun). Our guess is that this whole episode amounts to more Microsoft-baiting
from the EU and Redmond's rivals...and more multi-figure paychecks for corporate
lawyers.
Posted by Lee Pender on July 19, 2007 at 11:54 AM