MicroSoft at it again....

[DNQuest.com]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070126/bs_nm/vista_microsoft_eu_dc

How much money dose Gates need anyway? It would not surprise me in the government decideds to really crack down on MS if these charges are proven to be true. Hopefully, money will not always win...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A coalition of rivals charged on Friday that Microsoft Corp.'s new Vista operating system coming out next week will perpetuate practices found illegal in the European Union nearly three years ago.

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The group, which includes IBM, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Oracle and Red Hat, said its complaints made last year are yet to be addressed just days before Vista is due for release.

The European Commission found in 2004 that Microsoft used its dominance to muscle out RealNetworks and other makers of audio and video streaming software and that it made its desktop Windows deliberately incompatible with rivals' server software.

"Microsoft has clearly chosen to ignore the fundamental principles of the Commission's March 2004 decision," said Simon Awde, chairman of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS).

Microsoft said it had no comment. The Commission was not ready to act.

"We are in the process of examining this complaint," a Commission spokesman said. ECIS disclosed on Friday that the latest additions to its complaint were made only last month, after it studied Vista.

Microsoft's new Vista operating system is due for formal release on Tuesday, including a major rollout in Brussels, complete with a news conference and party.

"Vista is the first step of Microsoft's strategy to extend its market dominance to the Internet," the ECIS statement said.

It said Microsoft's XAML markup language was "positioned to replace HTML," the industry standard for publishing documents on the Internet. XAML would be dependent on Windows, and discriminatory against systems such as Linux, the group said.

It said a so-called "open XML" platform file format, known as OOXML, is designed to run seamlessly only on the Microsoft Office platform. It governs the way a document is formatted and stored.

"The end result will be the continued absence of any real consumer choice, years of waiting for Microsoft to improve -- or even debug -- its monopoly products and of course high prices," said Thomas Vinje, lawyer for ECIS, in the statement.

Other complainants in the group include Corel, RealNetworks , Linspire and Opera.

SOME ISSUES RESOLVED

On some fronts, however, complaints were resolved. Microsoft announced earlier this month concerns raised by security companies such as Symantec and McAfee had been dealt with.

Those companies had said Vista would deny them access to the heart of the operating system, which they needed to protect it from certain kinds of malicious software. After negotiations, Microsoft said it would provide information the firms needed.

"The information was indeed what we expected and what we were looking for," said Cris Paden, manager of corporate public relations for Symantec, who earlier had raised concerns.

Microsoft has challenged the Commission's 2004 decision, which included a record fine of nearly 500 million euros ($649.4 million) and orders to change its business practices. It awaits a decision by the EU's Court of First Instance.

 

[Ronald Regging]

XAML replacing HTML? With the track record of IE, this is highly doubtful. I don't think everyone with a site on the web is going to rush out to recode their entire sites to use some new markup language created by a company notorious for severely falling short on this front. And if it's part of Frontpage, doesn't it even matter? No one who uses Frontpage even knows what a markup language is anyway

 

[B33R]

Loose XAML is the most obvious candidate for replacing HTML. Anyone who has played with XAML can see the obvious benefits and many people have tried to do test websites solely in loose XAML. So where does it fail?

1. Data posting - Loose XAML has no provision for the FORM element as in HTML. There is no way to accept a user filled in form and send the data back to the server as is commonly used in user registration, feedback pages, order forms, etc. Two way data binding could be used to do perform some of this functionality, but two way data binding requires a code file which is no available in loose XAML.

2. Script language - While XAML can be hosted in an HTML IFrame, the host's Javascript has no access to the XAML document or its DOM. In addition XAML can contain C# code directly in the XAML in CDATA sections. However this is supported by compiling the XAML and is only available when included in a .NET application. That is, code in CDATA sections is not supported in loose XAML. This is a major disappointment because .NET 3.0 is already required for display of loose XAML and .NET includes a C# compiler. C# in XAML is exceptionally useful and suited for even simple things as animations, basic calucations, posting to a server (item 1), and so forth. Much can be accomplished with XAML triggers, but even designers often resort to code.

3. Cross platform - XAML fails here, for now. But for many users on Intranets, extranets, and even the Internet Windows only is acceptable. Many sites are IE only and have been for years. That being said look at what Microsoft as done with the Office XML formats. If XAML were submitted to ECMA it would be possible for Mozilla, Mono and others to support XAML on other platforms. Even without ECMA, I expect that we will see third parties start to build XAML support.

http://www.kudzuworld.com/blogs/Tech/20061231.no.aspx
Plenty more info on that link too, apparently written by an MS developer so expect the usual MS BS when reading it.


I can't think of anyone who'd ever want to replace HTML with some crappy, MS, half-assed, Windoze only, language. It'll never happen.

They're too late anyway, maybe 4 or 5 years ago this could've happened, now too many people run non-MS products and consider MS to be utter s**t, the devil or both, for it to gain any real momentum/acceptance.

 

[iNod]

Sounds like B33R doesn't like Microsoft :O

They try to dominate everything.. But who doesn't? Apple does.. All major companies want to dominate everything if possible..

Kind of weird on how they want to push XAML.. It doesn't even sound good... And firefox reads it as a spelling error lol.

- Steve

 

[Ronald Regging]

I don't think it's a matter of them trying to dominate everything, I think it has more to do with them trying to force inferior products down our throats. It's one thing to dominate a market on the sheer quality of your service and products and a completely different thing to try to dominate a market through shady dealings, intimidation and intentional incompatibility, all of which MS is guilty. Personally, I don't really care about MS enough to hate them. They do their thing and I'm smart enough to find alternatives. When they create an OS that makes it impossible to find alternatives, I'll then just alternatively switch to another OS. I think it's a long way off before the majority of consumers will do that, but predict that if this is the case, some businesses will definitely make the switch. It's not like Linux is hard to run and I think it probably has more compatibility for Windows programs than Windows does Since getting XP, I honestly haven't had any complaints about the OS. IE sucked, but there was Firefox. I'm not exactly in a rush to buy Vista, actually I know I won't buy it at all. Sometime in the future I'll buy a new computer and if it has Vista, fine...