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)
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Re:Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
Princess Bride (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't think you can call it a monopoly if all the companies software in your country is pirated.
Actually, you can, given the fact that piracy is known Microsoft's tactics to capture vast amounts of market share. They just sit there and watch their share grow without spending a penny. They come later and put pressure on government and commercial organizations to make pay for their products.
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
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Re:Wha? (Score:4, Insightful)
Chinese plan: America should not be on top.
I think most Americans can see the difference.
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pass the popcorn, this should be fun!
Re:Wha? (Score:5, Informative)
Their political system is dictatorship, since they are governed by unelected representatives. Hence, the correct description for China would be capitalist dictatorship.
The reason they don't like Microsoft (or Google) is because the profits go to USA instead of to their government-endorsed corporations like China Telecom, Nuesoft, Baidu, Kingsoft, etc. And we are not talking peanuts here either: last year Microsoft alone paid about US$ 7,000,000,000 in taxes, 70+% of which came from foreign sales.
Re:Wha? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the gp said China was run by the communist party, which is 100% correct. His error is in thinking that any given communist party has the opposite agenda as a monopoly. On the contrary, communist parties are notorious for ruling as monopolies. Meanwhile, you are correct about the self-designated "communists" but that's another matter.
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.
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Plus they do not allow any of their other eight or so "political parties" to have any power and those 8 are only permitted to have any function whatsoever under the authority of the Communist Party.
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.
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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?
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National Socialism
... was, in power, as socialistic as the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea is democratic. The original principles of the NSDAP could perhaps fit your description, but after Hitler took over the party any socialist trends were suppressed (you've heard of the Night of the Long Knives?). To quote my Grandmother (my translation) "THEY, stole our revolution." 'They' being BigBusiness(TM) and the Hitler (as opposed to Roehm) faction of the NSDAP.
So when the government controls busines
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How about an antitrust probe of the government? (Score:2, Insightful)
Abnormal? (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, that sounds pretty normal to me.
Par for the course (Score:5, Insightful)
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Local corruption is blatant but you negotiate with the corrupt party directly openly discussing the quids for the pro quos. Higher you go, complex it gets. Often you deal with intermediaries, and you are not sure if they really represent the official they claim to represent, what is given and what is expected gets lost in translation.
And of course, I don't have any evidence. That is par for the course in slashdot. Announcements like this is a typical way to authenticate the official bribe t
The Microsoft Lottery (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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That would be 'all of them'. And if that's a problem, it's one that most people would dearly love to have.
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I know you meant whine, not wine and I am not a typo nazi either. But in this instance to wine is a perfectly decent response to the complaint. To wine means use wine to move your critical MS-win based exe files to Linux and stop the upgrade treadmill.
The Upgrade Treadmill (Score:2)
My box is in perpetual upgrade. The xorg-x11-Xnest package can't install right and so I always have 1 available update in my tray.
Re:The Microsoft Lottery (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know... does the great firewall block openoffice.org ?
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Does openoffice.org offer a localized Chinese (or other non-english) language version(s) (I'm honestly asking)? If not, this may be a limiting factor for adoption in foreign language markets.
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Point i
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If they show that they can sell Windows for a profit at $20 a copy in China, it's the beginning of the end for charging $300 a copy elsewhere. The fact is that an extra copy at $1 is profitable for them.
So they want to sell all the $300 copies, then all the $200 copies, then all the
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In countries like ours, sure, most people "pirate" a few things here and there without a lot of guilt. But if you asked the average American citizen if doing so was "wrong" or not, they'd TYPICALLY categorize it as "wrong" - with
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And I say, good for them. Microsoft has a decades-long history of lying, cheating, stealing, and generally screwing over the rest of the world in order to rake megabucks into their war chest. Therefore I have absolutely no sympathy when someone else screws them. If they want to play dirty then let the rest of the world play dirty against them. I hope the whole world has their
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Yeah, because two wrongs clearly make a right.
Doing wrong even to those who do wrong to you always comes back around. Not because any sense of karma or universal justice, but because nothing in the world happens in a vacuum, and there are always consequences.
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More communist lies (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:More communist lies (Score:5, Funny)
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http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070803-shocker-microsoft-combats-chinese-piracy-via-major-price-cuts.html [arstechnica.com]
Guess again.
Besides if they are too poor to buy Windows, how do they afford the computer to run it on?
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That to me is anti-trust to a "T." In no way whatsoever would another company get away
Antitrust over the 1 copy of Windows? (Score:5, Funny)
Not First Post (Score:2, Funny)
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In other news Microsoft is seeking an injunction against the FOSS community for unfair competition practices.
This is an old sentiment. From the Halloween Document [catb.org] of the eponymous date in 1998:
Linux distributors, such as RedHat, Caldera, and others, are expressly willing to fund full time developers who release all their work to the OSS community. By simultaneously funding these efforts, Red Hat and Caldera are implicitly colluding and believe they'll make more short term revenue by growing the Linux market rather than directly competing with each other.
Big LOL (Score:2)
The real question is what do they really want?
Not quite Soviet Russia, but... (Score:2)
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In Other News... (Score:2, Interesting)
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To Quote Nelson Munce (Score:2)
Once again... (Score:2, Funny)
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.
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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:Step 3 of 5 to economic collapse. (Score:4, Informative)
QQ sucks raging donkey balls. I'm not surprised they constantly monkey with the protocol. When all you do is rip off others, you get really good at it, and you know how to avoid getting ripped off yourself. I would call this blatant hypocrisy, but then hypocrisy is a Western concept that has no equivalent in China. It's always been "the leader commands this" and instead of wanting to make everyone equal, Chinese just want to become the leader so that they can be hypocrites, too. Fundamental cultural difference.
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I'm not a Microsoft fan -- but shouldn't China at least pretend to pay for all the copies they stole BEFORE they complain that Microsoft is a monopoly?
It's like someone who stole my car calling me up and complaining that I didn't pay the tag license on it so they'd like some money for they penalty they had
"China's State Intellectual Property Office" (Score:4, Funny)
How about a very different possibility? (Score:4, Funny)
Not only that, it finally gives the BSA the power it's looking for - let's hear it for the Chinese military fighting the BSA's battles to defend Microsoft's owners and their IP...
oxymoron (Score:4, Insightful)
Misleading comparison (Score:4, Informative)
HA! HA Ha HA ha ha! (Score:2)
On a slightly more serious note, I think the people attacking Microsoft's "monopoly" position are out of line. Not only are there alternatives, like OS X, but there are FREE alternatives that clearly produce similar results, like the many flavors of Linux including Ubuntu. Furthermore, Microsoft products don't force you to use more Microsoft products, it's just generally more efficient if you do. But that's the case with an
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It's way way more complicated then that for a lot of people, for instance games on windows will have a severe lag time before they are supported under linux, if at all. In many instances OTHER companies products determine what you choo
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.
Mod me as Troll if you will (Score:2, Insightful)
You know your doing somethin wrong when... (Score:2, Insightful)
The Doobie Brothers made a song about this (Score:2)
Any Doubts (Score:2)
Costs More? (Score:2)
It is hard to compare directly, but let's try.
Vista Home Premium (it has media center functionality): In China (according to Microsoft), 899 yuan ( http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-news/?p=953 [com.com] )
In USA: 239.95 usd ( http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/homepremium/default.mspx [microsoft.com] ).
Asking google for the conversion:
899 Chinese yuan = 130.628296 U.S. dollars
So, a product produced in the US costs 1/2 in a foreign country. Am I allowed to now purchase Chinese product
Boy... (Score:3, Funny)
Don't like it? Don't buy it. (Score:3, Interesting)
If they bundle whatever with windows, it is their business, and the whole EU suing is a ridicule.
Am I a MS fanboy? Not. I do not use Windows (I have one machine with it that I turn on once a month or less for testing software).
Up to2 weeks ago, the only MS product I used was an xbox 360, which naturally died, and was my last ever MS product I purchased. (I love my new PS3 though, so thanks MS to open my eyes).
Yes, for servers it is Linux and BSD, and MAC on desktop.
So No. I do not like, or protect MS, but they should price their product as they like, and they should bundle it with whatever they want.
How comes no one says : hey you have MSN messenger in xbox, and so you are damaging google and AOL( AIM), and ICQ.......
Everyone should have the right to say to a customer : "I hate you, and now your price is 100, even though your neighbour's price is 40."
It is like I sue BMW for having an mp3 player bundled with my car, which is built in, and is a bit problematic to remove.
Stupid world, stupid people. Then again, if you do not like it, just buy something else.
Oh... yes I switched to MAC after Vista came out. One week of usage, and I saw that this was the end of me and MS.
just my 2c
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for the part where they proclaim to be.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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I'm interested in seeing what the Tibetans get up to during the Games though - my guess is shenanigans will ensue, with the predictably heavy-handed military response. These Games could (hopefully will) end up being the biggest clusterfuck in the history of the Olympics.
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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:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The biggest obstacle is going to be the consumption of oil. China produces 60% of all oil consumed in the country, but reserves are expected to run out in six years
(Source: Teachers TV).
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Everyone's perfectly fine with facism, as long as they get their bread and circuses. Look at how many dictatorships promote the Hell out of their soccer teams, for example.
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
Both ideologies claim that society is greater than the individual. Both ideologies condemn all actions that don't benefit society as a whole. Both ideologies support environmentalism.
The difference? Communism sees society as encompassing all humanity, while fascism sees each state as its own society. Fascism is prone to nationalist posturing, while communism isn't.
Both fascism and communism oppose free-market capitalism. Fascism refers to an ideology called "corporatism", but that has nothing to do with corporations in the modern sense; the "corporations" in corporatism are basically trade guilds. Corporatism is about both putting society under the control of a collective, and tying such collectives into the state. It fits in with the whole "society as a whole" model, with each function of society overseen by its own collective, and all the collectives are part of a larger collective (i.e. the state).
China isn't really fascist; they allow multinational corporations to do business there, which real fascists would condemn. If China was fascist, they wouldn't let even local companies practice unfettered capitalism the way they do. A fascist state wouldn't let Chinese companies pollute as much as they do, nor would they let the companies do things like put lead paint into toys.
Now, I'm not defending fascism in any way. I'm a staunch individualist, and I despise both fascism and communism. My point is that China isn't really any more fascist than they are communist. Well, they do more than their share of hyper-nationalist posturing, but that's about it. China is simply a totalitarian state that tolerates capitalism. The free market is the one exception to China's totalitarian control over their people.
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.
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This no value added comment brought to you by one bored guy.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
U.S
* Banker makes loan to whoever they damn well please.
* Loan doesn't get re-paid
* Other bank takes over banks assets and screws depositors over 100k.
China:
* Banker makes loan to favored state owned company or other entity.
* Loan doesn't get re-paid.
* Government recapitalizes bank.
U.S
* Banker makes a bunch of questionable bad loans
* Retires with golden parachute package
China
* Banker makes a bunch of questionable bad loans
* Banker is executed by government
U.S
* Bankers en masse make loans to fund housing/stock bubble
* Government runs to see how they can loosen regulations to help the banks make exponentially more money and profit
* Bubble bursts, banks are bailed out by government discount window loans, TAF, TSLF,etc
China
* Bankers en masse make loans to fund housing/stock bubble
* About 1 year after it gets going government raises real estate transfer tax or stock trading taxes and bank reserve requirements to purpousefully punish the speculators.
* Bankers who make ridiculous corrupt loans are executed. Some banks who didn't get swept up in the bubble keep operating as usual
Long story short. In China, unlike in America, the politicians actually have far more control of the economic activity in their country than the bankers do.
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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?
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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Uh, you are asking why a Communist state would have state regulation of economic behavir?
Re:Take a guess (Score:4, Funny)
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