EC clears acquisition of Nokia's mobile device business by Microsoft

The European Commission has the duty to assess mergers and acquisitions involving companies with a turnover above certain thresholds (see Article 1 of the Merger Regulation) and to prevent concentrations that would significantly impede effective competition in the European Economic Area.







The EC has cleared under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed acquisition of most of Nokia Corporation's devices & services business (the "D&S business") by Microsoft Corporation. The D&S business mainly produces and sells smartphones and feature phones.

The Commission concluded that the transaction would not raise any competition concerns, in particular because there are only modest overlaps between the parties' activities.

More information will be available on the competition website, in the Commission's public case register under the case number M.7047.

European Commission fines Microsoft with €561m !!!

2 years ago I was blogging about this - "The EC killed Internet Explorer" and I was happy because the Commission won the case against the IT giant Microsoft for the Internet Explorer browser monopoly on Windows operating systems.

 

Today, for the first time in history, the Commission fined a private company for non-compliance and did it with a huge fine of €561 million for failing to include the browser ballot in Windows 7 SP1. With 15 million people not shown the ballot, the EC is effectively fining Microsoft €37 per user.

 

Microsoft said the failure to show the browser ballot was a "technical error" but the EC was not convinced and motivated their decision by the fact that this failure is considered a serious infringement to competition and European enforcement policy!

 

An important decision of the EC that creates a precedent and maybe a new will give ideas for new ways to increase the European budget that faced massive cuts for the first time since the EU was borne.

 

This fine practically compensates the huge costs the EC pays for Microsoft licenses, so it's like the institutions will use Windows and Office for free for a long time :) way to go !!!! the next fine it will be for Oracle ;))

 

Reflection points:

• Microsoft didn't considered seriously the Commission warnings and legal commitments, but they will from now;
• The Internet Explorer browser is a very important piece of software for Microsoft and they are not willing to sacrifice it ... cheap;
• The Commission likes big fines but gave no explanations on how the cost of €37 per impacted user was calculated?

Read more: Microsoft fined €561m for missing browser ballot |

Note: The European Commission has fined Microsoft, the global leader in PC operating systems, 2.2 billion euros (1.8 billion pounds) over the past decade, making it the world's biggest offender of European Union business rules (source Reuters.com).

The Commission killed Internet Explorer

On the tombstone it is written: IE RIP - March 2010

Here is the graveyard: http://www.browserchoice.eu//

It will be open Mid March!!!

Probably, not a lot of users will attend the funerals but what is important is that the Commission has finally managed to beat Microsoft. Ha ha ha!!!

Ok, ok I will tell you what is about: the Commission has won the case against Microsoft monopoly over the browser IE that was installed with Windows. This was considered as a restrictive measure over users and resulted in fewer innovative products on the market. So, the users will have a Browser Choice Screen, which will contain the most popular browsers from the market!!!

So, more than 100 million PCs will be updated from March for Browser Democracy!!!

This measure will be valid for 5 years so stay tuned IE Resurrection

…in box office from 2015 :)