Possible Delays for Vista in Europe

tttonyyy writes "After Microsoft was hit with fines for anti-competitive behaviour in 2004 and 2006, it seems that the launch of Vista may be delayed in Europe. Microsoft is blaming this delay on a lack of guidelines from the European Commission. The Commission denies causing any delay, declaring that the impetus is not on them but on Microsoft to produce a product that conforms to the EU competition rules." Further, The New York Times reports "Delaying the introduction in Europe, [members of the European Parliament] said in a letter made public by Microsoft on Thursday, 'would put European companies at a competitive disadvantage with every other company around the world who does have access to these new technologies.'"

Re:Emphasis?

[LearnToSpell]

Editors?

[crickets chirping]

Re:Emphasis?

[alienmole]

Who knows, maybe he meant onus [reference.com]. They all end in a similar "iss" sound after all, what kind of genius could possibly tell them apart?

Re:Circuitous logic?

[Anonymous Coward]

they have viewers for their file formats for windows...

Pure lies by Microsoft

[Alphager]

These are pure lies by Microsoft to gain some PR-advantage against the European Union. The EU has issued a statement that the release-date of Vista is 100% in the hands of Microsoft and that it does not intend to interfere(see http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/77945 [heise.de] for a german news-post about it). The EU had issued in january a questionaire to MS about the conformity of Vista to the several sentences MS got because of it's monopoly. MS answered LAST WEEK. This is not different to the US-market: MS has to conform to certain rules because of several past lawsuits. MS knew this from the start. If it does not conform, it is 100% MS's fault.

The MEPs named

[SpaceLifeForm]

Link [groklaw.net].

Re:Circuitous logic?

[Al Dimond]

I haven't read Microsoft's statement that Word docs aren't for sharing, but I do know they put a lot of effort into creating and marketing their collaboration features. I think that Word docs are absolutely meant for sharing and collaboration within an organization that's standardized around MS-Office; in fact, if you have people within an organization collaborating on office-type documents there's probably no better way to do it than MS-Office's collaboration features. Are there other office suites that offer these features? I mean, I love using TeX+CVS for that kind of thing, but how many office workers are going to understand CVS (I think most could be trained to, they're not idiots, but MS-Office uses language that typical office workers are more familiar with while CVS uses terms that geeks like me are more familiar with... )?

What Word docs are bad for is trying to share a document with people outside of your organization that aren't going to collaborate on it. For one thing, traditionally you could easily wind up with metadata that you don't want getting out, such as revision history, stored in the documents. I don't know if recent versions of MS-Office have easy ways to clean all the invisible stuff out, but it's always a risk when you have revision control info stored in the documents themselves. For another, MS-Office docs aren't designed to render the same way every time the way Postscript and PDF files are. These aren't so much flaws in office as design decisions, and for the market that Microsoft is trying to sell to they seem like the right decisions to me. It's just a shame that Microsoft doesn't beat the "don't email people .docs" drum a bit harder. It's easy for me to see the proper place for Word docs, but I don't need Microsoft to tell me that. They've gotta get this message clearly across to their users.

Oddly enough, once when I was in college some dude sent me a promotional poster for some event in MS-Publisher format. He clearly hadn't thought about document formats for even a second before sending it out, so I didn't want to hit him with the full RMS-style rant... but I did let him know that not only could unwashed GNU/hippies like myself not open the file, but that even many MS Office-using knowledge-worker types would have a hard time with it as well. And that for pixel-perfect final posters he should be using Postscript or PDF. And a URL where he could find a Windows PDF print driver. I also made sure to include as many sweeping generalizations about the userbases of the various software packages as possible... or maybe that was just this /. post, I can't remember. If Microsoft's not going to educate the masses I guess it's up to all the people that get burned by 'em.