EU's incoming antitrust chief says honorary degree won't affect view of Gates
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BRUSSELS  - The European Union's incoming antitrust chief said Friday she thought Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was doing a "good job" when she awarded him an honorary degree eight years ago as head of a Dutch business school.
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The European Union's incoming agriculture commissioner said Wednesday that the bloc's multibillion dollar farm subsidy program should remain under the control of the EU's head office and not be handed back to national authorities.
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the Windows application platform is to be fitted with "Fluent UI" ribbon capabilities now offered in Office 2007.The ribbon UI presents a new interface in Office 2007. "We usability-tested it massively, and fortunatel, it has had a very strong positive reaction," Gates said during a keynote presentation the 2008 Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif. "We in the next version of Windows will be using this Fluent UI quite a bit across a number of applications," he said. "It turns out it's a user interface that works very well for the pen and touch [interfaces] as well as being a better way of revealing application functionality."The Fluent UI represented "a major risk that Microsoft took," Gates said. But the older interface with its dropdown menus was hiding so much functionality that the company was being asked for features that were already there but were concealed, he said.At the conference, Microsoft is promoting Office as a development platform with users able to write extensions. During Gates's presentation, third party applications were shown that extended Office with custom development, such as the MindJet MindManager planning application and FedEx's QuickShip for processing FedEx shipments from within Microsoft Outlook.During a subsequent question-and-answer session with the audience, Gates was asked to compare and contrast opportunities for developers working with platforms like Microsoft's with platforms like open source. Gates responded, "Our platform is a commercial platform where customers expect a very high level of service, a very high level of integration, but the nice thing about it is they are willing to pay for software."Free software has always been around, he said. "We've always had free software out there, it's not really a new thing. In fact, I'd say in some ways it's less of a factor than it's ever been," Gates said.Everyone has the same business model, he said: Software developers have free versions of their software, inexpensive software, and robust commercial versions of their software. "The commercial environment, I think, will always be the pre-eminent thing in terms of providing business productivity," said Gates.He advised those who want to develop free software to be careful which licensing model they choose and to select an option that does not restrict commercial versions of their software.Asked about Yahoo, which has rejected Microsoft's $44.6 billion acquisition offer, Gates said the question was whether Yahoo should be a media company or focus on engineering. In an ad model, scale is needed, he said. Yahoo's engineering could be combined with what Microsoft has done, he said.Gates's overall presentation did not impress one attendee, who nonetheless was impressed with Gates himself."Bill is definitely a visionary, and he's one of the greatest men in the 20th century, but I have to wonder how much of that was just reading from a script," said Aaron Alanen, senior consultant at Sogeti."I did see in his questions later on that he really had some deeper knowledge," Alanen said.During Gates's presentation, he also played a tongue-in-cheek video about what he would do during his upcoming semi-retirement from Microsoft. Included were possibilities such as getting into politics, joining the rock band U2, and becoming a rapper or actor. Guests featured in the video included, among others, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bono from U2, and George Clooney.
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An EU commissioner said that EU leaders intend to keep their word over Turkey's entry into the European Union.
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The French president is persuaded not to try to dilute EU competition law through the new EU treaty, the BBC learns.
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A senior U.S. official on Wednesday   shrugged off EU threats of imposing visa requirements on U.S.   diplomats in retaliation against a U.S. delay in extending a   visa waiver scheme to all EU states.
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A European Commission official chosen   to lead Microsoft's antitrust case has asked to work instead   for a consultancy that has the software firm as a client, the   company and Commission confirmed on Wednesday.
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The organiser of the Glastonbury Festival is to receive an honorary degree.
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BRUSSELS, Belgium  - The Dutch woman nominated to the powerful post of European Union antitrust commissioner resisted suggestions during her confirmation hearing Tuesday that her extensive experience in the corporate world meant she might be soft on big business.
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Rocco Buttiglione, the incoming EU commissioner for justice and civil liberties, looks set to cling onto his job despite widespread outrage at his recent right wing comments about sexual diversity and women.
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A controversial Russian-German pipeline being built under the Baltic Sea will not affect Ukrainian or Polish interests, former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said in an interview published Saturday.
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BRUSSELS, Aug. 20 (Xinhuanet) -- Jose Manuel Barroso has vowed to put the competitiveness of the European economy at the heart of his five-year tenure as next president of the European Commission (EC), the European Union&#39;s executive arm.
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BERKELEY: The US has nothing to fear from rapidly growing technology markets in India and China, Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft said.
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As president of a Dutch business  school, Neelie Kroes once awarded former Microsoft chief Bill  Gates an honorary degree. But as the European Union&#39;s top  antitrust cop, she has fined his company millions.
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US software giant Microsoft said it would not appeal against a European Union court order that upheld EU anti-trust sanctions, but remained confident it would eventually win the case.
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Europe's competition commissioner Neelie Kroes is not shy of upsetting big corporate interests, writes Stephen Mulvey.
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The row over the incoming European Commission is only a hiccup which will make the institution stronger in the long term, Peter Mandelson has said.