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Microsoft will charge royalty fees in Taiwan
IT IS RUMOURED that Microsoft is going to impose a royalty levy on Taiwanese netbook vendors to force them to adopt Windows.
Apparently incensed at its lack of presence in the netbook OS market with Windows, Microsoft has been accused of pressuring Acer and Asustek by imposing royalty fees.
According to Digitimes sources, the Vole is threatening to charge the Taiwanese companies for Microsoft patents that are allegedly used in email and multi-media software, or sue them.
The sources claimed that the Vole plans to impose the royalty fees in the hopes that Acer and Asustek will knuckle under and preload Windows Starter instead of Google's Android OS or its upcoming Chrome for netbooks, both of which are open source and free of licensing royalties.
Digitimes seems a bit confused, however, as its report refers to Windows Mobile rather than Windows Starter. But we know that cannot be right, of course, since netbooks are not mobile phones.
If the Taiwanese information technology market is subjected to Microsoft royalty charges, it could be in big trouble. The INQUIRER reported two weeks ago that Taiwanese ODM's were betting on Android to keep their production costs down.
Android is huge in tablets and smartphones. It is also open source software - unless you're Steve Jobs - and very free. The ODM's don't have to fork out for OS licensing costs in their bills of materials. The reason for Microsoft's move must be a desperate attempt to maximise as much gain as possible from the netbook market, where sales have been is sharp decline.
The Vole has skirted the boundaries of legality, landing short or going over the line many times before. We don't yet know what way this one is going to fall, but so far it sounds all too similar to Microsoft's former PC operating system preload contracts that charged PC vendors for every machine they built, whether or not they were preloaded with Windows. Those were deemed illegal in the US. µ
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Does anyone really expect anything from Microsoft besides mob style scare tactics?
I'm in SE Asia, looking to replace my three yo. Linux eee pc. The only linux netbook is the aspire in Thailand. In Singapore and Malaysia, every single cheapo has windows 7 starter, which isn't an OS but an advert for windows proper.
Microsoft successfully killed off the small ssd, thus killing all netbooks, and had them replaced with 160gb drives (heavier and more damage prone) so you've all got enough space to upgrade.
Hopefully we've all got more sense, and will at least boycott the new W7 phones, lest they end up owning everything.
They install a patent free Android.
The user loads the (free) patent infringing software from an appstore
MS can go sue Google.
that finally microsoft bully one that will NOT tolerate it.
i hope that acer and all taiwan show the finger at microsoft and tell them "you dont want we buy your product, fine... anyway we, taiwan alone, buy 90% what you sell"
hope you stay in bussiness without our money.
This rumor makes no business sense for Microsoft. Would Microsoft sue their own customers, who install Windows on tons of PCs? And charging royalties for "patents that are allegedly used in email and multi-media software" ??? Awfully vague. Makes no sense either. How could Microsoft charge certain companies and not others?
Microsoft usually chooses the litigation option, due to its farcical attempts at coding, security, and marketing making competition on the "merits" of its products impossible.
Unfortunately, the more they choose to play the corporate bully, the worse their already-damaged reputation becomes. What's "cool" about owning a system run by a bunch of stodgy old farts who can't market their poorly-designed products, and who treat everyone -- including their customers -- as criminals.
I hope they get their asses sued and fined by various governments over this latest anticompetitive tactic. I also hope more people, companies, and governments wake up to the real "cost" of doing business with greedy, proprietary, autocratic companies (like Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle).
...I would start releasing netbooks based on NVidia's Tegra2.
Then I would tell Microsoft "Yeah, we'll ship it with Windows. When you manage to port it."
While the anti-trust division has been practically dormant since the Reagan administration, M$ offenses are so egregious that in any other era, it'd have been prosecuted a dozen times. It's more of a monopoly than any during the classical period: those were limited by the costs of putting together actual goods, while M$'s per-unit costs soon drop to near that of a CD, or less.
Anyway, I've no doubt that M$ got from under the one anti-trust case by secret agreement to put in back doors for NSA.