Two US software firms are asking the European Commission to take action against Microsoft's new Vista operating system, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Adobe Systems has told EU regulators that Microsoft should be banned from incorporating free competing software for reading and creating electronic documents with Vista, the paper said, quoting people familiar with the situation. Anti-virus software maker Symantec will send officials to Brussels next week to brief journalists about features of Vista that it has told EU regulators will undercut rival makers of computer security software, the paper said.
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Member since:2006-04-21
It harms consumers by providing less choice. Allowing a vendor to have a de-facto monopoly increases the chances of the vendor supplying a product that is shoddy and/or overpriced, because he has no competition. Cases in point: IE between the fall of Netscape and the rise of Firefox, or just about anything in the Eastern Bloc.
Member since:2006-09-01
Less choice how? Shoddy and overpriced pretty much defines Symantec, much less so with Adobe Acrobat.
The competition from MS will force Symantec to build a better product rather then the crap their stuff is now.
Adobe will have to step up and innovate on their PDF format. Better compression, closer integration with Flash, become much more web friendly. PDF is a good format, but it's not web savvy and is blight on the Internet. I personally avoid it, and use HTML if at all possible. Having PDF creating functionality is one thing since it hurts the Acrobat Authoring suite, but complaining about a rival file format is silly. They're just going to have to compete.
These guys had to have known this was coming since it's only a matter of time before stuff reaches critical mass and becomes a must have baseline feature, like an web browser. MS did overstep the line when they integrate IE, but they still needed to provide web browsing functionality in the base install.
Member since:
2005-11-13
If a move like this were to hurt consumers I'd say there is an argument.
I can't for the life of me see how getting functionality for free harms me as a consumer so I'll have to say at this point that the arguments put forth by symantec and adobe is weak at best.