China Antitrust Law May Target Microsoft – News and Analysis by PC Magazine —
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We’ve all seen this coming for sometime.
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The newspaper said China ‘s State Intellectual Property Office was organising companies to bring lawsuits to challenge Microsoft’s pricing and the dominance of its products on the Chinese market.”Microsoft Windows retails at 1,000-2,000 yuan ($145-$290) and its Office software suite at 4,000-5,000 yuan, which together is more than the cost of a computer,” one source told the newspaper.
“It is not right for an international company to use its monopoly position to sell software at outrageous prices while criticising the Chinese people’s awareness of copyright law.”
An antitrust lawyer told Reuters that although the new law will come into effect in six weeks, the final version has not yet been published. But oversight of domestic competition was likely to remain with officials from the State Administration of Industry and Commerce (SAIC).
Well… They did get convicted of it here in the states. Of course they apparently bought off the right people after the fact. Is it really any wonder that other counties (Like the EU as well) would go after them for the same reason?
This pricing argument is specious. We aren’t talking about commodities sold in a perfectly competitive market; so the seller still gets to set whatever price he wants. It’s then up to the consumer to either accept the price or not, and then the seller can choose to react by changing it… or not.
If Microsoft want to sell Windows for 1,000-2,000 yuan, that’s their business.
>> When will Ballmer snap?
Balmer’s already snapped:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE
The difference between Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs on stage parallels the difference between the PC and Mac actors in those Apple ads on TV.
Oops… See also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk
Really the governmental mismanagement of the Microsoft issue on a global scale cracks me up.
The word processor and the spreadsheet were invented nearly 30 years ago.
Now you would think 30 years later, such software would be a commodity where several nearly identical products compete and serve the same function and are largely judged on price — like photoshop software, accounting software, etc.
But the enough of the world governments turned a blind eye and lately the ISO even ratified a ridiculous proprietary Microsoft format.
Give Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer for credit for managing to milk word processing and spreadsheets into a 20 years and counting monopoly cash cow. It is an extraordinary feat.
Microsoft’s anti-competitive actions have left the Chinese with only one major operating system to pirate. Oh, the humanity!
#2–SeaLawyer==can that be right? I thought the sin of gaining monopoly strength in a market was just exactly that–that you can charge whatever you want, unrestricted by free market competition?
I haven’t followed the issue, I though most of the anti-trust claims were all about tying arrangements requiring manufacturers to package windows, explorer, etc?
Anyway, the thrust of the previous comment was EXTREMELY valid. If the USA and the EU have prosecuted MS for anti-competitive behavior, why shouldn’t China?
The Chinese are smart business competitors. I suspect they’re preparing the way to compete in the software industry. Let’s face it, the software industry only requires one important resource, the human resource, and it’s one China has in abundance. They’re thinking they can compete, maybe they can. They’ll probrably have to compete with MS’s usual array of unfair business practices, though I think the chinese might be able to demonstrate some unfair business practices of their own.
Ballmer and China ??? The “Monkey Boy” will go APE-S**T !!! “Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers; Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers; …” What a REVOLTING DEVELOPMENT !!!
Maybe I’ve just been bought off by corporate interests (I mean, Bill Gates himself offered me money in my email the other day and all I had to do was forward his message to my whole address book…), but lately every anti-trust complaint against Microsoft has been crap.
I mean, back in the day when they were doing some pretty scummy stuff then sure, but now the best they can come up with is that the government thinks people are too stupid to download iTunes or Firefox and so automatically Microsoft has a monopoly on media players and browsers?
Or its priced “too high”, when really its not and there are plenty of ways to get it cheaper (especially if you know someone in college, I got XP Pro for $6 through them, and Office Student Edition is only like 150 and you get 3 licenses) Although most versions of Office are priced entirely too high, which is why I use OpenOffice.
#7, the only type of market where producers cannot set the price is a perfectly competitive one. Those are largely an academic item used as a way to easily model ideal conditions since in reality they don’t normally exist outside of some commodity markets (e.g. farmers don’t set the price of corn).
Compare that to a monopolistically competitive market (which most are) such as the automobile market where a manufacturer like Lamborghini can set the price for one of its cars in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The problem with monopolies isn’t necessarily that they are evil, but that they are inefficient. With the rampant piracy that apparently goes on in china, it seems to me the only person being injured by the price of Windows is Microsoft, because nobody is buying it.
#11–SeaLawyer, gee, I don’t want to write a dissertation, but your post is mostly off point and irrelevant. I won’t repeat my post that you ignored.
For now, I’ll just say your post makes as much sense as saying that Lamborghini can set any price they want for their cars. They can? Who would pay $60 Billion for their cars? And if not $60 Billion, on what evaluation do you think they set the “suggested retail price” of their market?”
The car market is very diverse. What percentage of the OS does MS have? Yea, very comparative.
#12, As far as bringing up the US and EU cases goes, “me too” isn’t much of an argument for anything. If all the Chinese are complaining about is the price, then their choice is to not buy what is being sold to them and use Linux (or whatever else they use instead of a legitimately licensed copy of Windows). Microsoft can adjust if they want to sell more, or not, they are still in control of the price they charge. If everybody in China is using Linux or a pirated copy of Windows anyway, who’s the one actually hurting from the pricing scheme?
Even a pure monopolist is setting his prices based upon market demand, he’s just restricting his output to the point where he can charge the most he can for it.
Will China outsource the tech help for their version of Office to India?
I for one would simply love to be a fly on the wall when some Chinese government bigshot tells Ballmer “no” on some issue, just to watch him explode.