Comment by Michiel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Michiel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I wonder if the European Commission will open another antitrust case. The last one was about the "Tying of Internet Explorer to Windows", this one could be about the "Tying of Cloud Offerings to Windows"

To me it seems that when users are going to upgrade to or buy Windows 8, they will probably opt-in to cloud storage from Microsoft. Long term Microsoft may lock-in a very significant percentage of desktop, laptop, smartphone and tablet users to their services. It doesn't seem to be a level playing field for e.g. Dropbox.

More generally speaking, it looks like the big three have a strategy to use the OS as the 'gateway drug' to their online (cloud) offerings. By offering integrated always available API's to 3rd party developers they ensure the path of least resistance always leads towards iCloud, Google Docs/Drive and Windows Live/SkyDrive.

Microsoft still has a monopoly on the desktop as far as I can tell. So it's going to be interesting if another antitrust case will be started. We may end up with a 'Windows 8 N' or a "Select your cloud provider" choice screen in the future.

I think that is a load of toss.

Sure there are dedicated clients for Windows, but you can access the entire of their "cloud offerings" via the web and some rather nifty APIs.

Ultimately my point is that it is no different to any other "cloud" provider out there.

You can also quite happily create a word doc on skydrive from a web browser. You can even mount a skydrive volume on Linux as it's just a WebDAV share as well.

Microsoft aren't the same company these days.

Check this out:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104(v=prot.10)....

I can't find info on mounting a Skydrive via webdav from Linux. You sure about this?

http://windowslivehelp.com/thread.aspx?threadid=cac1c1ae-b78...

Microsoft would have to conspire and use its monopoly powers to undermine and place barriers to entry of SkyDrive's competitors, for something such as the above to happen.

Bundling or providing for download a cloud storage application or service is not illegal. Having a monopoly is not illegal. Providing useful applications and features with Windows is not illegal.

Don't want SkyDrive? Don't use it. Do as you did before, download your choice of a cloud storage application and use that instead.

From what I've read about the way Metro style apps can implement contracts it wouldn't be hard to build an S3 app that let you load and save files from any application to your Amazon storage.

A better product always wins out. The browser antitrust case was a farce. What actually caused IE share to go down was not the antitrust ruling but a much better product by firefox and chrome. If dropbox is better, it will win no matter if skydrive/iCloud and google cloud are integrated in their respective OS.

Only disagreement is your use of the past tense. The case and its sanctions continues to go on in Europe, and costs Microsoft tens of thousands of man hours of lost productivity writing useless protocol documentation that only serves as a gift to competitors. The result is consumers get delayed, hamstrung and costlier products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com