UnNews:EU bitch-slaps Microsoft
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| EU bitch-slaps Microsoft | 
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6 March 2013
VIANDE DE CHEVAL, Europe -- The European Union has fined Microsoft $732 million for failing to obey a 2009 agreement, in a verdict that includes some novel additional penalties.
Microsoft promised the E.U. it would include a BCS — not indeed a college football tournament but a "Browser Choice Screen" — in Windows 7 rather than herd all its users into using the lucrative Internet Explorer software. This need for a "level playing field" is the same reason that every Chevrolet sold in Europe is delivered with a little man in the passenger seat who badgers the driver into declaring whether he wants the Delco radio replaced by a Blaupunkt at no cost.
Unfortunately, Microsoft, which intended to include the BCS in the first "service pack" that it sneaks onto users' computers in order to "service" them, did not include the BCS, in what Microsoft refers to as a "technical glitch," when it is not referring to Windows 7 itself as a "technical glitch." What's more, Microsoft did not even realize the omission for months. UnNews is preparing a scandal for the weekend telecast that the glitch was caused by an entry-level coder who was a non-English-speaking sub-Saharan Aspie hired solely to fill the maximum number of categories in America's diversity legislation, and was supervised by a former hamburger-flipper hired to comply with the law against overpaying management.
The E.U. ruled in 2009 that Microsoft's policy, which assumed that buyers of a Microsoft operating system would rather have it include Microsoft pieces, was abuse of its monopoly position. This monopoly was declared, without even having to leave the United States, a decade earlier, as Microsoft had 99% of the market, when you fail to count Apples and PCs running Unix. Also iPhones, of which there didn't used to be any. In the intervening decade, Microsoft has only fortified its monopoly, hampered only slightly by the fact that the entire market for PCs is going to Hell, no one in his right mind still uses Windows 7, no one even in his wrong mind keeps Internet Explorer on it, and the only people who still take their computers with them outside the home don't leave home anyway for fear of missing a phone call.
Microsoft is expected to easily pay the $732 million from its cache of loot kept outside the U.S. to avoid the new Obama taxes on millionaires-and-billionaires that will naturally increase employment. The fine is especially merciful as it removes the temptation for Microsoft to buy another house-of-cards like Skype.
The E.U. also sentenced Microsoft to fight the decline in the computer business, which threatens to some day keep Eurocrats from vilifying Microsoft as a monopolist, by purchasing Dell Computer and continuing to pump out more PCs that nobody wants.
Sources[edit]
- J.P. Gownder "Microsoft's European Fine Comes in an Era of Browser Diversity". Forbes, March 6, 2013
- Editor "Busted for Browsing". Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2013