Word: microsoft
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Passport has Microsoft's competitors worried that Gates & Co. want to use it to collect a fee on virtually every online consumer transaction. AOL has charged that Passport is Microsoft's attempt to gain a "choke point" on e-commerce...
...Microsoft insists that the complaints about Passport are overblown. The only information it collects from Starbucks buyers, it says, are e-mail address, city and state, and it promises not to turn that data over to third parties. Microsoft insists it never asked Starbucks.com to make it an exclusive payment option. "It's totally at the discretion of the participants to decide what makes most sense for their business," says Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn...
...While the locals fight it out, multinationals?with the exception of Microsoft?remain warily on the sidelines, unsure if they can profit in China's savage market. Today, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard have a combined market share of under 3%; Palm and IBM don't even sell PDAs on the mainland and there isn't enough Mandarin software to spur consumer interest. "We know this is a weakness," concedes Franklin Sze, product director for Compaq's iPAQ in Greater China. Preoccupied with tough times at home and hobbled by supply problems, U.S. PDA manufacturers have focused international efforts instead...
...hindered by a lack of common software standards. Each PDA maker has gone its own way, creating homegrown?and incompatible?programs for each device. There is little incentive for the independent software developers that have helped come up with 10,000 applications for Palm and more than 650 for Microsoft's Windows...
...Yang Yuanqing. But it's not easy to persuade rivals that cooperation is worthwhile. Legend, more than any Chinese player, has pushed for common, open standards. So far that hasn't paid off for Legend or its partners. The PC maker introduced China's first PDA based on Microsoft's Chinese Windows CE in May 1999. It has also promoted H-Open, a Chinese operating system it co-developed with a government think tank. But today, PDAs with Windows account for just 15% of Legend's sales, while buyers flock to low-cost devices running cheaper software. No outside developer...