You know you’ve hit the big time when you are fined by a the Continent of Europe. Of course for Microsoft, the company has no doubts it has hit the big time. In fact, when you are that big, you can choose to ignore judgments against you. At least that is what european anti-trust regulators are saying when they brought suite against Microsoft in the tune of $1.3 billion, as reported today by the New York Times. The regulators say that Microsoft failed to comply with the results of a 2004 judgment about the company abusing its market dominance. In that judgment, Microsoft was found to have gained an unfair market advantage with its Windows operating system.
This new fine, levied by the European Commission, because Microsoft has not met the prescribed remedies to rectify the situation, brings the total that Microsoft owes to about $2.5 billion.
Microsoft responded that it was reviewing the commission’s action.
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If you have a HotMail account, you know first hand that things weren’t working quite right yesterday. The Window’s Live services experienced a wide-scale outage yesterday, and many HotMail users simply couldn’t get to their accounts. The outage is still affective users as I write.
Microsoft said that it is looking into the problem, but it doesn’t know a cause for the disruption. About 45 minutes ago, Microsoft released a statement that the problem has been fixed. The company apologizes for any inconvenience or disruption.
Even if you can now get to your mailbox, you may notice that your services are a “little wonky,” as one user I know personally, says. This is an improvement from yesterday, when most users were greeted with a blank web page with the message, “Service Unavailable.”
The outage occurred just hours after Microsoft announced that a good deal of the Live servers was running Windows Server 2008.
Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, technology in the Computing Blog, and creating a home in the Home Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.
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