Re: [school-discuss] MS Schools Agreement anti-competitive UK

[ian <ian.lynch2@ntlworld.com>]

On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 21:37, Harry McGregor wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 13:22, Paul Tietjens wrote:
> > If you don't want to license all of your machines, there are many options 
> > available.  They aren't forcing you into the agreement, so...  I fail to see 
> > how they 'force' you to license all machines.
> 
> Microsoft is not forcing you to use the new license agreement.
> 
> What Microsoft is doing is preying upon unsuspecting, and usually ill
> informed school IT managers to further lock-in microsoft's illegal
> monopoly.

Its a mistake to focus on the school. I made the complaint as a supplier
not as a customer of MS. I am a competitor who can not compete fairly.
Microsoft's spokesmen told the Times that they had many happy
customers.Again an irrelevance. This is about the competition act and
its related to competing companies. Its probably why nothing has been
done about it so far, simply no supply company complained. There are
relatively few companies supplying desktop solutions to schools using
Microsoft free products, a lot of the Linux stuff is done by technicians
and enthusiasts in-house. Of course this could remain the case if
anti-competitive practices are not challenged.

> While Microsoft is well within their rights to put into the EULA that
> they have full rights to your first and third born kids, I doubt it's
> enforceable.

Quite so. And if the effect is to block other competitors out of the
market they will get found guilty no matter what the intention. The law
is clear on the point that a company with this dominance can not make
conditions that have the effect of discouraging competition, end of
story.

> In a normal situation Microsoft's licensing of "every computer" would
> probably not trigger complaints,

That is the key. They triggered a valid complaint from me :-) If I
hadn't complained and no-one else did they would just carry on because
the OFT only investigates complaints, they don't read every EULA etc and
try to find issues.

>  but in the current environment, it's
> insanely stupid for microsoft to do it.  Both the US and the EU are
> looking at microsoft's anti competitive use of it's monopolistic powers,
> and this does factor into them.

Yes, I would say if ever there was a turkey voting for Xmas, building
blatantly anti-competitive strings into license agreements in the
current climate is simply asking for trouble. I'm just surprised its
taken me to make the complaint, I would have thought Sun, RedHat, Suse,
Mandrake etc would do it but they are too removed from the schools
market I think.  BTW, We supply Microsoft Software too, we sell quite a
lot of it but we also provide Linux based thin clients and I have
already got evidence that MSSA makes it much harder to sell these
solutions into schools, I'm sure others will have too. It damages our
business because Linux systems are actually commercially far better.The
schools generally transfer the license costs to services from us so we
make more money and the schools get better service. Shhh though, I don't
want too much competition ;-)

-- 
ian <ian.lynch2@ntlworld.com>