Comments on: South Korea fines Microsoft $32 million

Regulators say Redmond violated Korea's monopoly rules by bundling Windows products in ways that hurt competitors.

[Jerry Dawson]

It works this way...

As Microsoft have a monopoly with their O/S, they charge as much as they like for the O/S and claim MSN and WMP etc. are free.
Unless a price is put on these 'add-ons' and Microsoft forced to sell its O/S at a lower price if it is without the bundled add-ons, the situation will not change.

More sue Microsoft

How many lawsuits do you think this company has at any given point in time?

This is ridiculous.

Microsoft knows that these lawsuits are often underinformed. Any changes they have made to the Windows operating system were cosmetic.

They'll simply do it again. They'll put in some "solution" that the law can consider proper when in reality, it's just another cop-out solution like the Set Program Access and Defaults functionality.
That had me laughing the first time I saw it, because the MS apps in question remained largley unchanged and still default to their dominant behaviour.

The integration is still there, they just polish it off differently so that un-technical lawyer zombies can finish their work.

[Earl Benser]

This isn't enough to get MS's attention...

$32 million is chump change to MS. If they can buy off some
problem for such a piddley amount, the dollars flow automatically.
All it takes is some 9th level manager to sign off on the payment.

I just hope that South Korea has no delusions that this fine is going
to change anything.

[KTLA_knew]

Give it away

If MS doesn't want to go to the trouble of implementing the new features that SK is demanding, perhaps they should just release Windows free of charge there.

If they withdraw from the market and not allow anyone to buy, it might give folks incentive to go to Linux and other alternative OSs.

If they aren't going to get the revenue anyway, just state publicly that they won't prosecute any piracy in SK, and stop charging. At least they'd keep their technology in use.

[unknown unknown]

RE: South Korea fines Microsoft $32M

Assuming Microsoft complies with this order I suspect we'll see lawsuits from companies who's products weren't listed in Microsoft's the required "messaging center". People still use MSN Messenger?

[SystemsJunky]

Message has been deleted.

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