Chinese Government Probes Microsoft For Breaches of Monopoly Law 110
DroidJason1 writes The Chinese government is investigating Microsoft for possible breaches of anti-monopoly laws, following a series of surprise visits to Redmond's offices in cities across China on Monday. These surprise visits were part of China's ongoing investigation [warning: WSJ paywall], and were based on security complaints about Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office productivity suite. Results from an earlier inspection apparently were not enough to clear Microsoft of suspicion of anti-competitive behavior. Microsoft's alleged anti-monopoly behavior is a criminal matter, so if found guilty, the software giant could face steep fines as well as other sanctions.
Re:So... (Score:2, Informative)
Huawei, ZTE, or Red Flag linux are all fine as 'monopolies',
Except that none of these are monopolies. In fact, they are not even market leaders.
Have you actually been to China? (Score:3, Informative)
China with its essentially a rigged economy based on something close to slave labor.
And you know this how exactly? I've actually been to China whereas you pretty clearly have not. Slave labor? 'Fraid not. China has a lot of people and so thanks to supply and demand, wages are relatively low there. (but rising fast) Yes the Chinese government has a hand in everything but there are plenty of places in the US and EU economies where free trade does not exist and the government is heavily involved. Agriculture, weapons manufacturing, Boeing/Airbus, satellites, automobiles, and many more.
The only way to compete economically with that is to become that.
Your argument would be more credible if the US and EU didn't have manufacturing sectors equal to or larger than China's manufacturing sector. Cheap labor is only helpful for products that have a high labor content. Lots of products require relatively little labor or require specialized labor that isn't cheap anywhere. I have a stamping press in my plant for making wire leads. Operating this press requires some of skilled labor to set up and then it is all automated. No amount of cheap labor from China can undercut us on price, we're fast and we can pay our people good wages too. There are some products we can't compete with China on and there are some products China can't compete with us on. The trick is knowing which is which.