09.03.14
Microsoft Should Not be Considered Too Big to Jail
Summary: Microsoft continues to use dumping as a strategy which revolves around starving the competition, not beating the competition
OVER THE years we have covered very many examples of Microsoft crimes; it was rare to see Microsoft executives going to prison and when they were sent to prison — which did occasionally happen — it usually wasn’t for their activities inside Microsoft. It is abundantly clear that the company attracts anti-social people who are knowingly and consciously applying for a job in a company that's widely recognised for crimes and abuses.
Techrights is not unique with its views regarding Microsoft. We often agree with people like Robert Pogson who now says that “Admits Defeat” and shows that, based on this report, “Microsoft has recently reduced the number of chassis suppliers for its Surface tablets and is now outsourcing all the orders to Ju Teng. Microsoft stopped placing chassis orders with its China-based supplier in August, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.”
These products have been an utter failure in the market. Microsoft loses a lot of money on them. Microsoft would even sell them at a loss just to ensure that it can somehow impede the competition’s growth. Known as negative pricing, this strategy is illegal, especially for monopolists. Microsoft even resorted to bribes and technical sabotage, licensing restrictions (anti-competitive) and other means. Microsoft is more focused on destroying the competition itself than actually producing decent products.
We are saddened to see that a lot of the corporate press, which is often funded by Microsoft one way or another, continues blaming GNU/Linux for lack of growth (or for very slow growth) on the desktop. This biased media would conveniently ignore explosive leaks about Microsoft’s abuses — leaks which are publicly available. The corporate press likes blaming GNU/Linux itself, pretending that Free software has inherent technical issues or usability issues. As GNU/Linux does not have a vast marketing budget like Apple’s, the media can actually get away with it, too. Repetition leads almost to a complete acceptance, even by the victimised (learned hopelessness). It becomes challenging to challenge. Journalists in corporate press will therefore carry on bashing GNU/Linux rather than discussing all the sabotage directed against its adoption, including the latest in Munich.
Pogson has just put together a compact list of Microsoft’s abuses against GNU/Linux adoption and the adoption of competition in general, starting with:
M[icrosoft] has deliberately violated the laws of competition in USA and elsewhere repeatedly, systematically and with malice. They are out to get us. At first they got an exclusive deal with IBM to get their foot in the door, piggybacking on IBM’s branding with business, then they demanded exclusive deals with ISVs and manufacturers, then they punished any manufacturer who stepped out of line and installed competing products, then they created an endless chain of incompatible file-format changes and created whole industries based on the existence of overly complex secret protocols and finally forced the world to accept a closed standard as an open standard… That whole burden has served to render IT more expensive to own and to operate and much more fragile than it should be just on technical merits.
Based on this new article by Swapnil Bhartiya, dumping (selling at a loss) continues to be somewhat of a strategy at Microsoft. As he puts it: “Microsoft is taking a page from its history to counter Chromebooks, an increasing threat to Microsoft’s PC market. They are getting their hardware partners to flood the market with ‘cheap‘ netbooks to combat Google’s Chromebooks. We earlier reported HP’s plans to bring really cheap netbook and now ASUS is also joining the rag-race.”
The funny thing is that Microsoft spent so much time and money on negative advertising, slinging mud at Chromebooks for being too cheap to be workable. Here we have Microsoft putting itself in the same cage it used to rattle, as if it chalked around some carcass and is now laying itself right within the chalk’s boundaries.
One day, one can only hope, Microsoft will get sued severely for its anti-Google tactics and its anti-GNU/Linux tactics. For now it still seems like Microsoft has greased up (i.e. bribed) enough politicians to make itself immune to much-deserved prosecution. █
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