Here we are, today it became clear what the final decision of the European Commission will be of the antitrust case against Microsoft.

The second biggest court in Europe has ruled out to reject the software maker’s request to to overturn a 2004 ruling that the company had abused its dominance in the market niche. Now Microsoft will have to pay the fine total up to $689.4 million.

Congrats to EC and its double standards when reading of the EU laws. As Robert Kramer from Microsoft said “…this ruling will do is send a message to companies that if they establish a good market position with a successful product, they will be forced in Europe to essentially give up that product to their competitors”, and he is completely right here as now the big companies who want to share any European market will have to play the EC game or pay their price.

Wish I was Microsoft’s competitor right now - I would love to have their secrets and make money out of nothing.

You can read more about the story in my post from yesterday or in the news section of International Herald Tribune

Tomorrow is very important date (17th of September 2007) for the future of the informational technologies and the multi million companies. The EU Court of First Instance will give its decision on the antitrust case against Microsoft.

I was formed back in 1998 when Sun Microsystems started a legal proceeding of Microsoft about exercising monopoly over the software industry. After the 2 giants have cleaned their differences the case was taken over by the EU Commission (EC).

Now, some years after and fine for Microsoft, close to $ 1 billion, we are in about to hear if a monster companies will have their strongest competitor not in the face of their closest rivals but in one super national institution.

Well, what can we expect - if the software company loose the case and pay its fine, we will be upright a new order. What is that mean - the companies will have to have a close look before they start their businesses in Europe.

If lost, this antitrust case may give the nations in other regions of the world to use it as precedent and start their own legal proceedings against those big firms. What will be the final result - guess, you can never win if you try to confront with any democratic country and its laws. And believe me, there are always things to start with.

What’s next - the other big companies who think that can use their connections and lobbies to accommodate and make money around the world. The same cases and allegations could apply for all the big actors.

What else - if we see such a practice in EU, may be the same will happen and in the US, where most of the companies until now, had one of their biggest “fans” and supporters.

But the EC played it bad!

The other side of the coin - this new anti-big-company policy sounds far from what the original purpose of EU was. I cannot see here the 3 pillars of EU - economic, social and environmental policies, foreign policy and military matters and Justice and Home Affairs.

Here I see only The Free Will of EC.

I am not even sure what will happen with all the little European entrepreneurship especially if they are bounded to the new technologies.

It actually does not matter if I (or you) am a fan or not of Microsoft and all the monopolist companies out there, but the fact is that we all exist because of the technologies invented by them and some of us are addicted, right?

The problems is somewhere beneath - what is the European Commission doing? Is it going to defend the rights of its citizens or it want to compete one private company in higher level? Is this a fight for monopoly or way to impose monopoly?!

How knows, lets see.

What drives people when they are starting a new business venture, this is a very fundamental question I think, and everybody should have his own answer. Would it be ambition to be successful or the ambition to make money. It can be even to challenge him/her self with something different, I cannot tell for sure. And, right after the start it probably does not matter for all of us but it should!

The fundamental thing here is that as one business starts to grow, if you are not a huge company, means that you probably do not have a good business plan, or do not have one at all. Which is OK for starting own business. But what about the 2nd year? Lets say you are an average market stakeholder and want to grow as fast as you did in the first year.

The first thing people usually do is to try to be more aggressive on the market and to advertise as hard as they can when the easiest way is just to re-attract your existing customers and make them stay with you. The new ones will keep coming with not that much efforts but the serious problem may arise when you need to make your current clients to stay with you and renew the services.

What is that mean? That the services you offer were good enough for them and you cost them little troubles or none or that they don’t care of the service but about the customer service attitude. Just a small percent of the happy customers care of the prices you have if they are content with the quality of service.

Then what to do, concentrate over the chase for new customers, do both, or first start with the ones you have. There are some political theories saying you need to go and get those possible votes in the elections campaign that may give their vote for you and leave the ones you already have for the last days before the elections.

Well, the situation with the web hosting business is not quite the same IMO. It is differentiates a lot as you need to make sure your customers like you at all and not because its you , but because of what you are doing for them.

It is very hard to try more and more to come with some special universal way to hold with the concurrence but the most important is to have you first customer on the 5th year in business.

So, what do you think, is it Task or is it a Job?

I just saw an article on BBC News regarding an impressive amount of countries which are filtering certain web content to be unavailable or not reachable to their citizens.

What a shame! We just started to believe that 21 century will be the end of the discrimination, the multi nation war experiments and the beginning of the free will expression, political and economical globalism and new technologies surrounding us and giving the people the unique experience to be able to touch different cultures and lives.

Well, we are all wrong, the world is not going in such direction, its going down, how the politicians expect, or at least are trying to make us believe, they want to stop the conflicts on the hot spots on the planet or that there are tons of legislations regarding the actions that could be taken against the corruption, the discriminative and abusive political regimes and everything that could be leading the modern world to the dark side.

I am not sure how to continue so you can see it for yourselves - Global net censorship ‘growing’

Just for instance, you may check the pictures of the day page, it says everything you may thing of .

Good Luck!