A berlini szabad szoftver-vitáról

El kell szamoltatni a kepviseloket, mire koltik el az adofizetok Euroit. Szivesen megkerdeztem volna kis orszagunk vezetoit, amikor volt az (kozep/felso)iskolai tanarok es diakok reszere kedvezmenyes (~3 kHUF?) ofisz licensz, mert az allam bacsi jol kipengetett par milkat a te verejtekes adodbol az m$ bacsinak. Mikozben az oo.org mar regota meg van honositott verzioban is. Namost vagy komplett idiota volt az allam bacsi, vagy nemely bacsikat jol megvett kilora az m$ bacsi. Imho.

Btw. a cikk emlitette kifogasok nevetsegesek. m$ bacsi ott is van, korrupt/hulye politikus meg minden bokor mogott talalhato.

ASK Me No Questions, I'll Tell You No Lies

Microsoft Monopolies Hurt Europe's Economy

The car ride with Microsoft Germany's national technology officer, Walter Seemayer, on the way to a government roundtable was a chance to discuss Microsoft's role in the European software patent debate. That led us to Microsoft's formal and informal allies, and next to the way large corporations try to connect patent legislation and job location in order to pressure politicians. We have finally come back full circle to my conversation with Seemayer. A large part of what Seemayer and I talked about was industry-related but of no relevance to the software patent story. However, one particular point that Seemayer made is part of Microsoft's official position on software patents: Microsoft's contribution to employment in Europe.

He said: "There are many jobs in Europe at a company like Microsoft." I can't deny that. Microsoft has roughly 10,000 employees on this continent. What I strongly disagree with is the claim that those jobs are a good reason for Europe to give Microsoft software patents and thereby enable it to fend off the competitive challenge posed by open source.

In its fiscal year 2005, Microsoft generated sales in Europe of more than €10 billion, according to external estimates. That money goes to Ireland, where Microsoft pays a corporate tax of only 12.5 percent on its earnings, and from there the profits go straight to the US. In the US, Microsoft employs about four times as many employees (around 40,000, three quarters of them in the Seattle area) as in all of Europe combined. Worldwide, only about one in six Microsoft employees is based in Europe.

Let's assume that Microsoft has an average annual cost of €200,000 per European job, including salary, social charges, travel expenses, office overheads, and so on. That number is probably too high, but if you multiply even that number by 10,000 European jobs, you only arrive at a total European labor cost of about €2 billion. While it sounds like a lot, €2 billion is only about 20 percent of the money Microsoft sucks out of European governments, companies and consumers per year.

Obviously, Microsoft has other costs here as well, such as physical manufacturing of some goods (nothing major compared to Microsoft's product prices), marketing expenses, and legal fees. But there is no question that most of the company's European revenues don't benefit European employees or subcontractors. The beneficiaries are Microsoft's mostly American shareholders, Microsoft's mostly American employees, and the Irish government, and to a much lesser extent, the US government.

Microsoft's subsidiaries in countries like Germany or the UK pay hardly any corporate tax. Fiscally, if you buy a Microsoft product anywhere in Europe, you buy it from Microsoft's "European Operations Center" in Ireland. Local subsidiaries like Microsoft UK or Microsoft Germany only function as internal service providers that operate on a "cost-plus" basis: the parent company transfers just enough money so the service provider can cover its costs and turn a negligible profit in the high-tax countries, while the real profit is generated in low-tax Ireland.

At the roundtable of the German ministry of economic affairs and labor, I once again met Robert Gehring from the Technical University of Berlin. He and I were the only participants in that roundtable who had also participated in the ministry of justice roundtable two weeks earlier. Gehring mentioned the US economy's trade surplus in intellectual property, whose annual value is in the tens of billions of dollars, 75 percent of which is generated by the European subsidiaries of US corporations.

Those numbers are not staggering if you consider the strength of the US's software companies and entertainment industry. However, Gehring pointed out that a significant part of that trade surplus is attributable to the fact that due to the aforementioned network effects monopolists such as Microsoft can overprice their products. They can charge more than a competitive market would tolerate. It's primarily due to its monopolies that Microsoft can move far more money out of Europe than it has to spend here. If competitive pressure from open source forced Microsoft to cut its prices in half, the ratio would become much more favorable to Europe. Microsoft would still extract a lot of money from the budgets of European governments (that is, taxpayers), corporations, and consumers, but a more substantial percentage of it would actually be spent over here.

If the major European governments (Germany, UK, France) additionally forced Microsoft to pay a reasonable share of its corporate taxes in the countries in which it generates its sales rather than in Ireland, home to only 1 percent of the EU's population, Microsoft's contribution to the European economy would indeed be appreciable.

No Lobbyists As Such