Untouchable China

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1533

Mary-Jo Foley’s blog has prompted me to write something I’ve been thinking about for a while.  I too read about companies in China readying their ‘Anti-Trust’ actions against Microsoft over Windows and just rolled my eyes.  While I didn’t know if it was accurate or not, it wouldn’t have surprised me.  After reading Mary-Jo’s update it seems they are looking more specifically at Office.  This is getting absurd.

So, let’s break down what they think is anti-competitive.  Quoting Mary Jo’s quote - “Tsao said ‘there’s no question Microsoft engages in many monopolistic practices,’ adding that the tight integration between Office and Microsoft’s dominant Windows operating system makes developing a product that works as well with Windows difficult.”  So, because Microsoft makes their products work really well together, that’s a monopolistic practice because other companies aren’t able to make it work quite as well together?  Are you kidding?  The ENTIRE POINT of Anti-Trust law to the begin with (in the US, where I believe the first Anti-Trust laws were created) was to ensure that better products continued to be made.  That was the point, to allow innovation to continue by preventing brute force to keep better products from being marketed.  Well?  Now we’re talking about Anti-Trust action because a product is TOO GOOD?  This defeats the entire purpose!  And coming from a country who doesn’t obey anyone else’s laws or respect other nations trademarks, patents, etc, this is ridiculous.

So, that brings me back to untouchable China.  Who, gets busted for having another girl pretend to sing in the opening ceremonies because the actual singing girl wasn’t cute enough to cheating during Olympic events (having a 13 year old girl on their gymnastics team) and yet the world just lets them get away with it.  Why is this always the cycle?  Why must the world always cower in fear until it’s too late and it takes a war to fix it?  (Reference the entire world’s history on this one.  Dictators through-out history and in the current world could be stopped with little to no causalities and chaos/wars if they were simply stopped early, rather than the world placating them thinking if we will be nice, they will too.)

Anyhow, it just seems very hypocritical coming from China where their government has a monopoly on freedom.

Mary Jo’s right, I too am surprised I haven’t seen anyone call for Anti-Trust on Microsoft due to the expiring of XP.  Now companies must be forced to keep inferior older products around to not be anti-competitive.  So, apparently, Microsoft is now guilty of using it’s evil anti-competitive methods against itself.  I guess that’s a little like having split personalities that are arch enemies.

Absurd.

(PS – I await all the ensuing anger for me calling XP an ‘inferior’ product to Vista.  I look forward to you trying to prove me wrong on that.)