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When the UK government announced plans to shift to the .odf Open Document Format, and away from Microsoft's proprietary .doc and .docx formats, Microsoft threatened to move its research facilities out of the UK.
The prime minister's director of strategy at the time, Steve Hilton, said that "Microsoft phoned Conservative MPs with Microsoft R&D facilities in their constituencies and said we will close them down in your constituencies if this goes through" "We just resisted. You have to be brave," Hilton said.
Although I am not a great lover of Microsoft, I'm not sure that this is any different than many other companies who will try to protect their profits - and, arguably, the jobs of their employees - when they can see the potential for the loss of business. But perhaps other companies are a little more subtle - especially when it is obvious that official papers will one day become public knowledge.
[Editor's Comment: This submission has been significantly edited - comment is not attributable to sigma]
[Editor's Comment: Please see public apology regarding this story.]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 22 2015, @11:42PM
We've seen these sorts of problems for decades, and there's no end to it. It's too tempting for the powerful to resort to threats and bullying to get their way.
Society takes a lot lying down, even accepts it with resignation. Anti-social behavior gets worse until that changes. No one is surprised when Comcast dishes out appalling treatment to customers. If we could, we would punish Comcast by taking our business elsewhere. There are other things we could do, but there seems no will to do anything more.
As for MS, most people don't just grudgingly live with their rules that hurt everyone so that MS can make a little more money, many people really like them, think MS has a right to "protect" their business. Even more so with Apple. It's sad how effective the corporate propaganda machine has been.
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Saturday May 23 2015, @12:14AM
All you need to take business elsewhere is a free market.
But the free market does not exist in practice.
So, resistance is futile, but it's also the only option. Bend over and it will simply get worse faster.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @08:53AM
Free market, bullshit. Free market would require unlimited companies making unlimited diffrerent ways of business. That's why free market is not possible ever. Free market is like a religion. The reality is, there are some companies offering some services and most of the time the services are pretty much the same. Some small differences exist, sure, but not every way of making business is actually possiible. The other part of the reality is that those companies have a certain reach. Sure there's the internet now, so you can order many many stuff from pretty much anywhere, but services are a harder thing to acquire from far away. It's also harder to know what kind of business they are from far away. So you have your choises from what's available locally, and if all of them suck, you are screwed. It does not matter, if no one limits their operation. If they all see, that it's much more better business to be shit in what they do, then they'll probably be shit at what they do. There are limited number of people, there are limited number of resources, free market idea is based on the idea those aren't limited and there always someone who does business the nice way or if not, then someone will always magically create one. Yeah right.