Microsoft News Tracker

Aoife White explains at the AP:

Microsoft Corp. took the unusual step Thursday of making public its formal response to European Union charges that it was failing to comply with a 2004 antitrust ruling.

Companies usually keep their defense secret, but Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans said the company released the non-confidential version of the report out of concerns the entire regulatory process has not been transparent enough.

The document outlines some of the ways in which Microsoft believes that EU regulators have changed or have not been clear about the expectations they have for the company, Evans said. It also highlights the growing tensions between the software giant and the European regulators.

“We think that this is necessary to ensure that we get a fair hearing,” Evans said.

The 78-page response, along with several appendices, was filed with the EU on Feb. 15 as the EU threatened the Redmond, Wash., software company with daily files of $2.38 million.

The full set of documents is available here and in skimming them, I didn’t notice any particular surprises for anyone who has been following this case. Presumably, Microsoft and their counsel feel that the public release cost them nothing and will bolster their case in the court of public opinion, although one can question the extent to which the notorious EU bureaucracy is ever affected by that. More plausibly, it could be another step in a campaign to woo individual national governments and if that is the case, that means Microsoft has given up hope of reaching a satisfactory settlement with the European Commission or within the EU legal system and will need relief at the highest level.

Is it nostalgia for the 90’s or am I caught in a time warp? First, Microsoft reintroduces a warmed over bCentral, now Google has resuscitated the “build yourself a free home page service” concept with a spiffy AJAX Page Creator although mercifully without the annoying ads that were the hallmark of such services in the past. Chris Sherman has the details at SearchEngineWatch:

Google Page Creator is a web based application that uses a basic what-you-see is what-you-get style of interface, designed to allow anyone to create and publish web pages, regardless of skill or knowledge level.
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Google Page Creator is a web-based application that runs on any computer or operating system. To use it, you must have a Google account and a Gmail address. Pages that you create are stored on Google servers using a URL convention of gmailname.googlepages.com.

Each user is provided with 100 megabytes of free storage space, and while there is a limit on the amount of bandwidth a site is allowed, Rosenstein says he doubts most people will ever reach the limit. The limit is primarily in place to foil the efforts of spammers, he said.

There are few restrictions on the type of content Google will allow users to publish, though Rosenstein said there won’t be any mechanisms for ecommerce or interactivity.
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Pages hosted on Google Pages are ordinary web pages, and will be included in Google’s (and presumably other search engines) web index, though they won’t be given any special treatment in ranking.

Despite their best intentions, I think they are going to have a problem with various forms of abuse. However, a bigger question is, why? Google already has the free Blogger service for would-be webloggers, so the suspicion is that it’s market positioning against the wildly popular MySpace. If so, they are going to need more than a few generalized web site templates to play.

As for the other players, Yahoo and Lycos still have those golden oldies, GeoCities and Tripod, complete with the annoying ads. Microsoft has the free MSN Spaces blogging service, but nothing in this arena and it’s not clear that they should. The real question is if or how the big names are planning to compete with MySpace.