Setting the record straight: a response to the Association for Competitive Technology“We would like to set the record straight”, said PIN-SME Secretary General Sebastiano Toffaletti. “European SMEs fully support the European Commission’s efforts to stop Microsoft’s tying practices, which are detrimental to the innovation potential and future competitiveness of ICT SMEs as developers, content providers and users. The opinion of ACT is a biased voice that does not represent the point of view of European SMEs.”
According to ACT, SMEs should benefit from the existence of the Microsoft monopoly in the browsers market. In its submission to the European Commission, on the contrary, PIN-SME stressed that SMEs benefit only when a variety of open and standards-compliant browsers exist in a market of vigorous and undistorted competition. In such a market not only do products compete on their merits, and SMEs will be able to benefit in their own development from the resulting browser innovations, and they will be able to design their applications to function equally well on all browsers.
“While we agree with the ACT’s claims that the some desktop applications may not work if IE is unbundled from Windows, this is actually the evidence that MS has put in place an anti-competitive behaviour by unnecessarily tying its operating system with its native browser. Moreover, ACT’s statement only concentrates on desktop software development and ignores that real competition is more and more happening on web based applications. For SMEs to grow and compete in the web applications market, it is essential to maintain a level playing field by enforcing the existence of a variety of open and standards-compliant browsers”, explained Mr Toffaletti.
PIN-SME also questioned ACT’s impartiality and its ability to provide an independent SME representative opinion on this matter. ACT’s internet homepage lists only 59 companies, including Microsoft and other IT multinationals. On the other hand, PIN-SME is a truly SME oriented organization, whose funding comes exclusively from its SME associations members, stressed Mr Toffaletti. “As the true representative of ICT SMEs’ interests in Europe, we look forward to working with the Commission to further elaborate how this practice in the browser market is significantly harming our sector”, concluded Mr Toffaletti.
About PIN-SME
Launched in December 2007 by national sectoral SME federations and ICT clusters in eight EU countries (Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Austria and Spain), PIN-SME is the first European association exclusively focused on representing the interests of the SME community in the ICT sector. It directly represents around 50,000 European SMEs in the ICT sector. Additional information can be found at: www.pin-sme.eu
Press contact:
Sebastiano Toffaletti
+32 2 2820530
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