China Launches Antitrust Probe Vs. Microsoft 295
snydeq writes "China has launched an investigation into whether Microsoft unfairly dominates its software market, according to a state media report. A working committee of China's State Intellectual Property Office is investigating whether Microsoft engaged in discriminatory pricing and will also look at Microsoft's practice of bundling other software programs within its Windows operating system, according to the report. The probe is part of a greater sweep of operating systems and other software developed by multinational companies that cost much more in China than in the U.S. 'On the one hand, global software firms, taking advantage of their monopoly position, set unreasonably high prices for genuine software while on the other hand, they criticise Chinese for poor copyright awareness. This is abnormal,' a source said."
Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about an antitrust probe of the government? (Score:2, Insightful)
Par for the course (Score:5, Insightful)
The Microsoft Lottery (Score:4, Insightful)
More communist lies (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for the part where they proclaim to be.
Re:The Microsoft Lottery (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't like the rules in the country you try to do business in, then don't do business there, and don't whine when their courts fine you for breaking them. Or perhaps this issue is a little bit more complex than a one sentence argument?
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
China is being heavily leant upon by the US and its stooges to do something about their prevailing culture of piracy - you know, the great DVD markets of Hong Kong and Shanghai where every film is available a month before it reaches the cinema, all that stuff. It's all to do with international trade agreements; China gets to make more money selling abroad if they stop ripping off Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Hitherto China has been happily ignoring Microsoft's monopoly by simply pirating everything. If they're going to go legit then they're going to make damn sure they don't end up paying through the nose for it, so they're raising the same monopoly issue that the US and the EU have done. After all, if China is going to play fair, then so must Microsoft.
Re:Wha? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Anti-individualistic, the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.... The fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.... Fascism is therefore opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number...."
Best description of China I ever read. That's straight from Mussolini's "The Doctrine of Fascism."
On a related note anyone read the article on how Chinese police jailed parents who tried to go back to the faulty death-traps - I mean schools - their government had built. The police were also instructed to keep foreign press away from the schools and to not let anyone take photos. A pretty good example of how the most important thing is the state above all - including it seems the needless deaths of children.
Re:The Microsoft Lottery (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 3 of 5 to economic collapse. (Score:3, Insightful)
US trades with China.
China outproduces USA on material items.
USA moves to Intellectual Property.
China ignores IP laws except where it suits them to make money.
US economy collapses
China is new global superpower.
Re:What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's quite possible for a Communist country like China to change their official ideology to Han Chinese nationalism and corporate state/slave labour capitalism and still be just as far from the UK, Canada or Australia.
So don't be fooled that they given up on 'Communism'. The PRC was never very socialist anyway, most European democracies went much farther down that path.
oxymoron (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The Microsoft Lottery (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Par for the course (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod me as Troll if you will (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Step 3 of 5 to economic collapse. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Step 3 of 5 to economic collapse. (Score:5, Insightful)
China is *hugely* inefficient, which is mostly masked by their huge growth. One thing that you have to remember is that the Chinese economy has *never* gone down in living memory. It's all up, up, up since Mao died and the national nightmare ended. This results in things like people opening businesses with no idea what they're doing, and the business succeeds anyway due to runaway demand. I see small shops open and close all the time, and it's the same story - no plan, no strategy, no marketing. It's just 'I'll open the doors and people will flood in.' The Chinese are geniunely shocked when they don't, and can't figure out what they did wrong. Really. Massive inefficiency is a hallmark of a prolonged boom (more annoying facts again - don't worry, I won't include any math) and China has been a boom (14%+ growth) for 30 years.
The Chinese don't invent new things, which is going to really start hurting in a few years when all their low-cost manufacturing isn't low-cost any more. I see it every day, a lot of people really don't know how to solve problems except for copying someone else, even to the point of investing huge efforts into it. Just think of how much better off China would be if they had developed their own indigenous computer systems instead of just pirating Windows. And no, I have yet to see a single installation of this "Red Flag" linux that someone always spouts off about. China does in fact have IPR laws, and they do work, but you have to actually follow them. Speaking of laws, there is a new anti-monopoly law in effect this year, and it's going to be used by the government as a club to bash foreign enterprises. Of course, Chinese monopolies are safe. Remember, cheating foreigners is patriotic.
Anyway, that's just my personal experience. Feel free to keep wishing hard for America to fall and China to rise. For further reading, for those of you who made it this far, check here (true today as when it was written) [tsquare.tv] and Danwei [danwei.org] and China Law Blog [chinalawblog.com]. Sorry to inject facts into the fantasy exercise - I realize it's a downer.
Re:Wha? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
This no value added comment brought to you by one bored guy.
Re:The Microsoft Lottery (Score:3, Insightful)
You know your doing somethin wrong when... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't believe the IOC even considered China. It's like hosting the games in Nazi Germany and having Hitler preside over the event.
Oh wait...
Re:Wha? (Score:4, Insightful)
Chinese plan: America should not be on top.
I think most Americans can see the difference.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ordinarily, no, I don't think so. There's a natural limiting factor to this kind of thing, because if you sell your product much more cheaply in a poor market than in a rich one, then people will make good money buying up stock in the poor countries, shipping it to the rich countries, and selling it on at a profit while still undercutting your official price there.
The problem comes when the product has a near-zero marginal cost to produce, and near-zero weight. It costs Microsoft almost nothing to stamp out ten thousand Windows disks and sell them in east Asia for a dollar each; if that's what it takes to compete in that market, a dollar per copy is better than nothing. But similarly, it costs me almost nothing to buy up ten thousand Windows disks and ship them to England, there to be sold in a street market; I can undercut their official price by a huge margin, and still turn a healthy profit.
Thus Microsoft play silly buggers with the EULA, claiming that their product is licensed not sold, and that it's illegal to use in England the copy they sold in China. And Hollywood play silly buggers with region coding as well, to make sure Europeans don't buy DVDs from America of films that aren't yet in our cinemas, and to make sure neither of us buys DVDs from China priced super-cheap to compete with the pirate market. Is that legal? Don't know, but it's sure as hell not right. If globalisation and free trade benefit the corporations, who'll outsource your job at the drop of a hat, it should work for us too: I want to outsource my DVD buying, thank you very much.
One thing I'm pretty sure of is that this is not legal within the EU. You can't sell a product cheaply in Slovenia and dearly in Germany, and then complain when the Germans buy in Slovenia. Apple ran afoul of that a little while ago with their iTunes pricing structure, though I'm not sure how that turned out.
Re:HA! HA Ha HA ha ha! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I tend to disagree.
Imagine you are responsible for the whole IT infrastructure of some company. The size of the company does not matter. Imagine you choose to deploy say Microsoft Office 2003 or (if you are more oriented or pushed towards smaller costs and/or increased "freedom") even OpenOffice.org .
Now try to imagine a reaction of a CEO of given company after:
To add more spice, imagine that client was a big one and potential income (and thus real loses) are quite big.
:)
All that thanks to inability or whatever of Microsoft to use and follow open standards or at least some decent backward compatibility and our quite small ability to push them toward that (thanks in quite big proportion to what some people call "dominant position in the OS market for PC" or, more importantly "dominant position in the office document format market for document exchange" which stems from the firts one), which would ussualy make the above example non issue.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you pay more because you don't have large institutions negotiating the price on drugs on larga scale (such as countries with nationalized health care), and because your insurance companies rape you for them, as their interests are aligned with those of the insurers. That, and the fact that the FDA functions in a completely innefficient manner.
Do remember that a lot of big pharma is based on Europe. Take Novartis for example.
Re:Wha? (Score:3, Insightful)
Establishing the monopoly by selling the product very cheap and then increasing the prices drastically is called dumping.
Dumping is illegal elsewhere, but Microsoft does exactly the same thing and is able to act as a victim instead of being prosecuted.
Re:Duck (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't that mean that they aren't communist and are a dictatorship ? Because in a communist government, there are no classes. So lets see we have A) Classes, B) Unequal distribution of wealth C) some people are really poor, others are filthy rich, and D) one party/person has total control. Seems like a dictatorship to me. And communism != dictatorship. They may be called "communists" but only in the way that the USA is called "free", in name alone.
Re:Wha? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well... doing business somewhere tends to put you on the hook for obeying
the laws of wherever that somewhere is. This could be murder, spitting on
the sidewalk, or shady business practices.
Try violating the laws of my state while doing business here and see how far that gets you...
China is a sovereign nation with it's own laws. Imagine that?
A Real and Big Change! (Score:3, Insightful)
Really?
Did they organize all farmers into Colletives? Did their government take over virtually all manufacturing enterprises (i.e. state own enterprise) ? Did their Communist Party install representatives in all enterprises to enforce doctrinal purity?
There has been tremendous change in people's thinking and the organization of productive activies within the last 10 years - since Teng Xiao Peng redirected China toward a more pragmatic path.
Listen to people who've visited China and don't rely on academic abstractions. US people have a bipolar attitude toward China. When they spout cliches toward one another, nothing is learnt and they will not gain a realistic picture of China as potential partner or competitor.
Original Definition of Fascism (Score:2, Insightful)
as opposed to universal socialism known as communism.
So when the government controls business, i.e. "nationalizes" or "socializes" it, that is fascism. At least in the original definition.
Re:Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at it this way: China is Communist in the same sense that America is Christian.
The leaders of both nations use the name, but they pretty much violate all the principles behind the name.
Of course, they're not the only country for which this is true.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most banks in America are FDIC insured. Post-Great Depression, can you name an instance where banks loaning money too generously resulted in "screw[ing] depositors over 100k?" Does this happen often? And does this happen because banks are pressued to make loans to "the little guy," whatever the current definition of that term is?
How many bank executives can you name that retired with a "golden parachute package" after failing at banking? Were they forced to retire, perhaps by the board of directors? Does that not sound like a clear case of "the system works?"
"Bankers en masse make loans to fund housing/stock bubble"... You realize that the housing bubble screws banks out of any money related to mortages? Y'know, how this "housing bubble" you say those evil bankers made involves them being stuck with a devalued house and a bad loan? I can see how they had to scheme hard for that deal - it must go all the way to the highest levels of our government!
Continue living in ignorance, and tell me where you cash your paychecks and keep your savings. I'll be happy to call you a hypocrite.