The thinking in most of the tech industry is we don’t need government intervention - at least not in the enterprise side of the business. Big corporations don’t need protection. They can hold their own against the big vendors.
I disagree. Even the giants GMs and GEs don’t make up even 1% of Oracle’s or IBM’s revenues. The buy side is extremely fragmented whereas the vendor side is increasingly consolidated. Corporations spend 85% of their IT/telco budgets externally, and 75% of that is with the top 25 global vendors like SAP, BT etc.
It screams for periodic government scrutiny. Especially when vendors pull shenanigans like misleading and scaring customers on the use of third party maintenance to protect their 95% gross margins. Or selling printer ink at $ 5,000 a gallon and still misleading consumers about ink levels in their cartridges so they buy more prematurely of that precious commodity. Or international roaming charges at 50 to 100X what local firms charge.
If the government does not stop such rape and pillage, why do we bother to have any police at all? Let’s just disband all regulation and law enforcement.
So, I am ok with Neelie Kroes, the EU Commissioner for Competition and her office’s periodic scrutiny of Microsoft or Intel or Oracle.
What I do not like is a seeming pattern of focus on US companies. While her office has moved against European telcos to cap mobile calling charges, I don’t see that office focused enough on European vendors like SAP or Deutsche Telecom. They need as much scrutiny as the large US vendors.
Of course, compared to what she has done in the last few years, our FCC, DoJ etc have been castrated when it has come to consumer protection around technology and telecom.
We need all of them to step up. Now, let me brace for hate mail saying government has no role in technology markets.
