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A fair point. I was only thinking of the OS group when I said MS doesn't make technical changes for the purpose of breaking competitors. Could you kindly present a contrary example from a public release of Windows?
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if you include providing communication protocols, then MSFT doesn't (until now) provide those and thus "breaks competition" by not allowing other software programs or network programs to work with it.
the EU just ruled on this and forced MSFT to provide these protocols in addition to a 700odd million euro fine
Barron
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I wouldn't include providing communication protocols. There's a huge difference between changing your OS so a competing program won't run and not telling the world how your own programs talk to each other.
I found the case you refer to on
Groklaw. Here's the important part:
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37 For the purposes of the contested decision, ‘interoperability information’ is the ‘complete and accurate specifications for all the protocols [implemented] in Windows work group server operating systems and … used by Windows work group servers to deliver file and print services and group and user administrative services, including the Windows domain controller services, Active Directory services and “group Policy” services to Windows work group networks’ (Article 1(1) of the contested decision).
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Ok, the complaint is MS hasn't published SMB. Now MS published an older version of SMB when they submitted it to the IETF under the name CIFS back when they hoped it would become an internet standard. CIFS is enough to make a "workgroup server", but you'll need to add the DCE/RPC that wuns on top of SMB if you want ADS support, and the complaint does.
I have a
book that describes much of what MS has been ordered to publish. Where did that information come from? It came from the samba team -- an open source project that offers a competing workgroup server. They reverse engineered the SMB protocol and achieved excellent compatibility.
Is the existence of a thriving competitor offering a free product enough to get MS off the hook? Nope:
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243 Nor can the Court accept Microsoft’s claim that it follows from the undertakings’ statements which it produced during the administrative procedure that there is already a high degree of interoperability between Windows client PC and server operating systems and non-Microsoft server operating systems, owing to the use of methods already available on the market.
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Let's summarize the crime without any acronyms. MS sells client operating systems and server operating systems to customers. MS develops proprietary protocols so the client and server can interact. MS doesn't publish the protocol. EU fines MS 500 million euros.
The analogy in poker would be requiring Stars to publish their protocol so you could use the Stars client at Full Tilt (after Full Tilt made themselves compatible), or use the Full Tilt client at Stars.
The most obvious reason MS didn't publish the protocols is publishing creates a tremendous backwards compatibility burden for MS. Today, there's a finite number of SMB implementations MS has to support, MS can test against them all. When somebody reverse-engineers SMB it is obviously their burden to get the details right. After they publish the bugs in competitors implementations of SMB become Microsoft's problem to solve. Here's
a real life example that is exactly on point. It's a bug in the Samba implementation of SMB that the MS Vista team had to solve. Now MS can look forward to fixing many more of these bugs in competitors. It's an expense being forced on them entirely by the regulators that adds no value to Microsoft's customers.
The antitrust complaints against MS have the interesting result of forcing MS to raise prices, not lower them.