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Story: Microsoft hopes EU will leave Vista intact
Posted by: Arthur B. (Tuesday 12 September 2006, 10:48 PM)
If security was indeed a top concern for European consumers then their politicians would have introduced realistic liability for the vendors behind the plentyfull security mishaps in IT land years ago. As it is IT vendors are overprotected and IT consumers are underprotected. For real security to even be able to begin there needs to be a balance in that first.
Furthermore, security as an excuse to do and get away with almost everything is getting annoying. As such the EU is warned to not say that they won't stand in the way of security related functionalities because next thing you know everything will be security related. Ask any modern politician looking for more power and control.
Microsoft has had years to be in full compliance with EU laws and regulations (they've postponed Vista long enough) so if they still have it wrong by now they might want to outsource their legal department (or the managers preventing legal from doing its work).
There isn't a single global version of Vista and there never will be whatever single version of whatever Windows version. Microsoft's own Marketing department made sure of that. So forget about 'the same new security features as everyone else'. First Microsoft should get rid of nationalized (security) patches, over (product) bundling and region specific extra's and specifics to be able to say that. As such stating that the EU should adjust to the rest of the world (Which 'rest'? Redmond specific maybe?) "for security reasons" only underlines what certain multinationals really mean with "thrustworthy computing".
As for anticompetitive. Netscaping and Novelling McAfee and the likes by pre-bundling Microsoft own "goodies" with a Windows version that soon will be the only available Windows version for many years to come will lead to historically known market effects. Denying that is like saying: there are no US troops in Bagdad.
And that's just an obvious example.
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