Microsoft Subpoenas Thrown out of Court 172
liliafan writes "Following Microsoft's attempt to subpoena documents through US courts, relating to their ongoing anti-trust case in the UK, the judge in California has thrown the case out of court citing: 'As a matter of comity, this court is unwilling to order discovery when doing so will interfere with the European Commission's orderly handling of its own enforcement proceedings.' as his reasoning."
What documents? (Score:5, Interesting)
What documents are we talking about?
Re:Does MSFT even sell 200M Euros a day? (Score:5, Interesting)
That would be a happy day for me. It would mean that nobody in europe could read MS office documents and all web sites in europe would have to work with firefox. Happy Happy day.
"Of course, there would still be "grey-market" sales, and "3rd party" support, etc."
Nah. Most likely thing that would happen is that the EU would stop recognizing MS intellectual property and void all NDAs. At that point windows would pretty much be open source and MS would get the shaft. Their only recourse would be to bribe enough politicians to wage war on europe. I am pretty sure Rumsfeld would salivate to wage war on "old europe" but I don't think that even the biggest war pig in washington would take on that cause.
"As much as many do not like MSFT, this stinks of some sort of politicical extortion, plain and simple."
Well it's aboutpunishing the guilty. Since they are not allowed to put corporations in jail fines are the next best thing.
Re:Quite likely. (Score:3, Interesting)
200 million euros at the current exchange rate is about $1.20 or so, meaning MS is looking at a fine of $240 million per day. MS's market cap is about $281 billion, meaning that if they could somehow completely convert all of that into real money right now, they'd last less than 3.25 years at that rate.
No matter what happens, I think MS is looking at having to shell out a lot of money soon.
Re:Does MSFT even sell 200M Euros a day? (Score:4, Interesting)
They broke the law.
To disuade them from doing it again a fine was determined that they *would* take notice of.
It *may* be the biggest fine ever imposed, but its the biggest company that such a fine has been imposed on. Microsoft have nearly $50Bn in cash reserves, its will not cripple them unless they leave compying with the request for a very long time, however I suspect Shareholders will want some answers.
Its not as if even they didnt have an easy way to get out of it.
They have 22,000 engineers and programmers working for them. If they cant split off 100 or so of them to produce documentation on the protocols and API's that the majority of the world run on. I find the fact that they *dont* appear to have this documentation already pretty close to criminal negligence, and wonder how they have managed to do this with SOX about, but thats a seperate discussion (We had to document *everything* for SOX including internal single use communication protocols between applications, and I only work for the *subsidurary* of a US company)
I personally due to the naked contempt MS seem to have for anyone who *dares* to investigate them, the browbeating of witnesses, the attempts to manipulate support through third parties, including members of the Senate, I think the fine should have been higher.
As for the threat to withdraw from the EU, Well even Microsoft havent tried that one on yet. The EU may be a smaller market than the US, but its not so insignificant that it can be ignored in such a manner, The shareholders would really make them suffer if they tried that.
However, I dont even think this would be a huge issue, but i am a terminal geek