Korea had the guts to punish Microsoft!
- Published December 11th, 2005 in Tech Comment, Upfront News
I didn’t see any news regarding the fact that Korea Fair Trade Commision had the guts to rule against Microsoft until today. They were warned before and threatened of seeing Windows being banned from South Korea but the decisions were not definite until now.
South Korea accused Microsoft of practicing antitrust actions, namely including their video player and instant messaging application bundled in with their operating system. The result was a noticeable decrease in sales of companies related to these two services — media content providers and instant messaging. This was already done before by EU that also ruled an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.
As far as I’m concerned I couldn’t agree more with this measure. Microsoft’s moves are based on abuse of dominant power, vendor lock-in and several other practices that should be banned on a free, open market.
The next move of this kind from Microsoft will be their new free anti-virus. There’s nothing wrong on entering the anti-virus market. What’s wrong is the way Microsoft does.. Microsoft’s way. If they ought to include the anti-virus on Windows by default, several anti-virus companies will be ruined. After all, who would be buying an anti-virus if there’s one bundled by default? Fortunately, they’ll be dealing with IT monsters, like McAfee or Symantec that won’t stand still. Nevertheless, they shouldn’t need to do anything. That kind of practices shouldn’t be possible at all.
Microsoft should concentrate on building a better operating system rather than trying to sell fixes to the holes they build!
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