Microsoft Threatens Startups Over Account Info

HangingChad writes "According to Fortune, there are reports that Microsoft is trying to strong arm startups to give preferential treatment to MSN Messenger and are using account information as leverage. 'If the company wants to offer other IM services (from Yahoo, Google or AOL, say), Messenger must get top billing. And if the startup wants to offer any other IM service, it must pay Microsoft 25 cents a user per year for a site license.' Of course, if the company is willing to use Messenger exclusively 'fee will be discounted 100 percent.' Getting detailed information is difficult as many of the companies being approached are afraid of reprisals."

They are all playing the lock in game

[Zeinfeld]

All the social networking companies are playing this game. The only difference is that when Microsoft points a lawyer at you, they are loaded.

Open Identity systems such as OpenID are the way to go. But how do we break open the proprietary lock? Tim Berners-Lee told me to look at FOAF but we still need to complete the integration into the authentication systems.

Heavy Foot

[mfh]

Microsoft has always had a heavy foot, but waiving fees for those who cut out the competition requires another solution.

Drop Microsoft! Just drop them. Stop using them. They are old anyway. Let's come up with something NEW!

Backfires inc!

Re:They are all playing the lock in game

[Zeinfeld]

Bad form to follow up one's post, but when I said the companies were all playing the same game, I meant the lock in game. The tactics are different but the idea is the same: the social networking company owns the contacts and the data.

You can export your links to other people in these schemes but the inbound links point in the same place, you can take your data but not your network.

One step forward here is that Google blogger has at last allowed people to use their own domain name with their blog. So you can move your blog to a different host if you please.

So, the real question

[WindBourne]

why are they still playing with MS? MS will ALWAYS pull these illegal actions. All the companies have to do is quit playing in MS's back yard.

What amazes me, is that MS does not buy companies who are on their platform. They just strongarm them and steal as be needed. Instead, they buy companies who could represent a threat to their platform or are making money hand over fist (the 2 tend to go hand in hand). So, by being in Windows, a startup not only pays much higher costs, but they also kill off a huge chunk of the market that would otherwise drive up their price, and then subject themselves to MS's hand.

Re:They are all playing the lock in game

[perlchild]

All the other companies aren't convicted monopolists...
Microsoft should be afraid of legal repercussions for using this tactic...
They're not, this indicates part of the problem with the punishment they've had so far(too light).

Re:They are all playing the lock in game

[jdevivre]

"Our data"? Is that even a legal position to take?

You know, I was all ready to "hear hear" that sentiment, and then I thought of the Postal Service. The content of a letter is mine (keep it simple and bypass copyright, etc), but the responsibility of delivery is theirs. They can't lose it, have it stolen, altered, copied or viewed by anyone (again, simplify) without "failing" their purpose. Same goes for the IM handlers, I guess. Having control over the in- and out- points, along with the channels between is just easier to meet the responsibilities.

So, not to defend the actions or strategies of MS, but the aspect you've focused on is at least open for discussion.

Plz mod parent up

[walterbyrd]

Msft advocates are fond of saying "everybody is doing the same thing." But the truth is that nobody is brazenly breaking laws, and otherwise scamming like msft. Not even close. Msft is in a class by themselves.

Msft scams include: outright lying to the US-DoJ in video taped testimony, letters from dead people campaign, the scox scam, the acacia scam, outright stealing stacker technology, fake benchmarks, use of shill "journalists" like Enderle, fake "independent" benchmarks, fake "independent" reviews, and on and on.

Msft == corruption, like no other company.

Re:Evil is Microsoft's most important product?

[Mike Arnautov]

I seem to recall that a few years back (quite a few years back) His Gateness was being quited in computing press as deriding other businessmen for their "merely finite" greed.

Could someone please explain?

[belmolis]

For those of us who don't use any of these services, could someone please clarify what is at issue. As I understand it, the problem is that people who have a contact list on a Microsoft service want to be able to use that contact list for some other company's service. Can't they just save their contacts in a file that the other services can import? Surely Microsoft has no claim to the data itself and therefore no way to interfere with importing such a file. It sounds like the other services are trying to connect to the Microsoft service and that that is what gives Microsoft something to say about it. Why do they need to do this?

The Practical Limits of Information Technology

[hdon]

It's amazing to me that we're now beginning to see the practical limits of the Frankenstein monster known as The Web. The Web was supposed to make information flow more freely. Yet due to its poor design, only tech-savvy users are capable of doing things like transfer their contacts from one service to another without there being some kind of automated behind-the-scenes linkage between the services. The fact is that Web clients (mostly browsers) have access to both the ability to pull your contact list data from a service, and the ability to push new contact data to another service. In theory then, shouldn't the platform be capable of allowing any developer to write a client-side web app that is easy for a novice to run and ensure his data security that would perform the transaction for him, and even reconcile discrepencies between contact list specification formats? Why is something as notionally simple as contact list transfer so technologically complicated that we actually consider it to be a great service to us when two giants like Microsoft and Facebook bless us with the ability to synchronize our contact information between them?

The web needs rethought if we really want to use it as a vehicle for efficient and unimpeded information transaction.

Re:What about Intellectual Property?

[Pat69]

Not when you store it on *MY* server. If you want to retain control of your data, then don't give it to me.

So if I were to host web sites on your servers, you would own the content on my sites?

Interesting...

Re:Not really...

[makomk]

Yes, I'm sure people who want to move providers would be willing to open and copy-and-paste out every email they ever received by hand, as well as all of their contacts. I think you're the one who should have thought before you made an ass out of yourself.