02.02.08
Meet Microsoft: World’s Chief Acquisitions Policeman
The first 3 hyperlinks in our latest news digest show that a Yahoo-Microsoft takeover is bound to face high-level scrutiny. Microsoft-owned or Microsoft-affiliated publications like Motley Fool are already trying to spin and trivialise this issue by pretending it does not exist, as in “if you say it many times, they will eventually believe it.”
As we showed several times in the past, several government departments (e.g. Department of Justice) are virtually controlled by Microsoft because they were occupied by Microsoft lobbyists that had been sneaked in a decade ago. Do not forget the FTC and the FCC, either. If you knew nothing about Microsoft’s political control, then now you should know [1, 2, 3, 4].
This bring us to yesterday’s news about Google facing further scrutiny in Europe. This was triggered by complaints which Microsoft had initiated several months ago.
Google Facing EU DoubleClick Objections
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The extended review initiated by the EU pushed that date out to possibly as far as April 2nd, after deciding in an initial investigation they needed more time to review the case.
Microsoft is trying to buy some time.
“It acts like a cop approving or disapproving other companies’ activities, but when it comes to its own strategic actions, it is virtually above the law.”But here comes the bit about sheer hypocrisy. Microsoft is currently offering to buy a major rival for no less than $40,000,000,000, but at the same time it also attacks Google’s planned acquisition of DoubleClick (valued at just over $3,000,000,000, i.e. an order of magnitude lower than the former). Adding insult to injury, Microsoft does all of this despite the fact that Microsoft itself offered to pay almost double that amount for DoubleClick. It was rejected by DoubleClick investors or a combination of factors that includes those investors.
Mind the fact that there are other attacks on Google (e.g. Viacom vs. YouTube) and it is quite clear that Microsoft called for such attacks. Microsoft is a catalyst for a fact. Essentially, Microsoft may have already been caught attacking Google litigiously, by proxy. It acts like a cop approving or disapproving other companies’ activities, but when it comes to its own strategic actions, it is virtually above the law.
Going back to the Yahoo-Microsoft bid, here are some thoughts and rants you might sympathise with:
When from 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live) — as all the others are mostly jokes — you manage to only have 2 (Google and YahooLive!), I don’t care whether they call it “oligopoly” or “monopoly”.
The world is defenseless in front of the corporate greed, and we’ll end in a world with no alternative choices. What’s funny, the name of this Orwellian world is not “communism”, but “corporative capitalism”, supposedly in a “democratic free world”.
On the same issue of undesirable (even hostile) takeovers, consider the fact that Nokia has potentially (and negatively) affected Android, which is Google’s gentle attempt not to step (or stomp) on other mobile Linux initiatives striving to centralise and standardise Linux development (thereby ending detrimental fragmentation). Nokia likes Symbian and it probably sees Qt as a threat. Nokia itself uses GTK in Maemo, so the acquisition of Trolltech was mysterious and seemingly insane, until you started to consider it sinister.
As a side note, Sun has a similar issue. It is trying to out-Linux GNU/Linux with OpenSolaris, but it’s duplicating effort. Andy Morton doesn’t want to merge with OpenSolaris. If Sun just ‘hijacked’ Linux, then this would be seen as a scenario similar to Oracle’s and IBM’s who, being giants, don’t want to alienate people by hurting ones like Red Hat. They haven’t properly marketed themselves as independent Linux distributors who fork communal projects. What will Nokia do with Qt? What about Zimbra? Or Xen for GNU/Linux? █
