EU Regulator Raids Intel Offices 138
stevedcc writes "BBC news is reporting that Intel's offices in Munich, Germany have been raided by European Union competition regulators. From the article: 'The Reuters news agency reported that the Commission also raided computer retailers on Tuesday including Germany's Media Markt, which sells PCs with Intel central processing units but not those made by AMD. Regulators have the power to fine Intel up to 10% of annual turnover if they find it guilty of stifling competition. Intel has said it is "confident" it had acted lawfully.'"
Re:The line forms to the right (Score:5, Insightful)
Gone Too Far (Score:5, Insightful)
When a group actually hates a company as much as people do here with Microsoft/Intel, it's easy to become overly biased against the rights of people to choose these two businesses.
AMD has built some big expensive fabs in Germany (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The line forms to the right (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gone Too Far (Score:5, Insightful)
- Dominant player in market cuts costs to below cost of manufacure
- Secondary player has to cut costs to match
- Secondary player has shallower pockets than dominant player and goes out of business
- Dominant player is now only player and can raise costs as high as they want to make back all they lost in action #1
There are reasons for market regulators, and not just because we European liberals like big government.Re:Gone Too Far (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Gone Too Far (Score:5, Insightful)
If this had always been true, it might be fair to say that AMD were a poor competitor. However, from the launch of the Athlon until the launch of the Core2, for several years, AMD had a better product, yet found major difficulties in getting market share. Intel's alleged tactics are illegal, and it's right that they should be properly investigated. It's just a pity that any fine imposed will hurt Intel but not benefit AMD or consumers, who are the real injured parties.
Re:The line forms to the right (Score:4, Insightful)
That's fine (Score:3, Insightful)
So unless you can show how Intel has been doing something illegal, like selling below cost, then this seems to just be a punitive action since AMD has a big fab in Germany, and Intel does not have any European fabs.
Re:The line forms to the right (Score:3, Insightful)
Your "informed economic decision" effecitvely rewards a company for poor performance. Not only that but it gets you, the buyer, a technically inferior product.
You're also baking in the assumption that price is the only differentiator here, when clearly it isn't. There's support, technical compatibility and platform choice, speed, stability, etc... that all goes into a decision like this. Now, if all these things are close enough to equal then by all means pick your favorite company if you want them to do well. But just buying a crappier chip and paying more for it out of some misguided sense of econ-101 isn't real wise.
What is it supposed to achieve? (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, come on. Its well known that governments will attempt to physically raid companies in search of the evidence they don't have. This is a high tech firm. Surely any sensible CEO would ensure that any questionable docs were held securely in another (corrupt) country, behind heavy duty encryption and only accessible by remote session.
Its not as if there would be a vast number of them, and the skills to make this invisible to the raiding agencies are not likely to be in short supply in somewhere like Intel.
All you can assume is that these raids are a show of force, not seriously expected to deliver anything of value.
Best Processors (Score:3, Insightful)
$35 or $150, wow that is a tough one.
Again, Intel isn't always the best processor.
Historical Monopolistic Practices (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Gone Too Far (Score:3, Insightful)
In the CPU front, the Core 2 is spanking the Phenom in all market segments, although the Athlon series is still holding on to the very low-end on low cost alone.
On the GPU front, they just gave up on the high end entirely for a while. The only way they can even compete with nVidia's 8800 series (which is about to be replaced with new cards) is to stick two of their best GPUs on one card. Yes, it's a neat technical solution, but it'd be a heck of a lot more impressive if each of those two GPUs was the equal of an 8800. nVidia's soon-to-be-released 9000 series is going to hurt AMD a lot. What're they going to do, put four GPUs on a card to compete with nVidia's one? What happens when nVidia starts putting multiple GPUs on a card, offering double the performance of AMD's solution?
It's only a matter of time before the Core 2 products start breaking into the very low-end market, and AMD gets supplanted there too. Unless their next generation of CPU and GPU products can actually compete on merit, it may not matter if Intel's semi-monopoly is broken.
Re:The line forms to the right (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I would have to think it is (Score:3, Insightful)
It's exactly what they were doing when AMD was dominating the desktop and 1P/2P server performance with Athlon. They were giving big customers huge rebates on their desktop and 1P/2P server chips to keep AMD from gaining market share, while raking in the profits on the mobile and 4P+ server chip sales since they were still dominating there. They were still profitable, while making AMD's life difficult.
It's also not true that they were still making tons of money. If you look at their gross margins, they severely declined over the last few years because of this competition with AMD.
Re:The line forms to the right (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's precisely why MS doesn't charge a ridiculous amount of money for their product, they know they would lose even more customers were they to do so.
Re:The line forms to the right (Score:2, Insightful)
I have this widget, which cost me $2 to make. I sell it for $1.
The goal is to move on to this:
Though I take a loss on every sale, the competition is a smaller business and cannot take the loss for as long as I can. Once they arebankrupt from either no one buying their products because mine are cheaper or also selling at below cost with their coffers running out sooner, I can then sell my widgets, that were previously $1 and cost me $2 to make, for $50.
Re:The line forms to the right (Score:2, Insightful)
PS Such behavior is irrational when viewing corporations and their customers as entities, and of course the motivations are quarterly earnings, EPS, and other jargon used mostly by people who don't know or care what they're talking about, but all come down to short-term interests of certain investors. I consider that by itself a good reason to dislike collective ownership and laws that favor collective corporate structures, generally. Collective ownership should not be outlawed as such, but it should receive no special preferences, either. Although AMD is also publicly-traded, they appear to have saner management, and to be at worst, a smaller contributor to the same problem, and often appear to have positive effects.