Now that Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are in a MAD contest to giveaway the biggest possible BI stack for free to sell their underlying databases, this raises some antitrust questions:
1)Is it an antitrust violation for a vendor to enter into an already existing and prosperous market and offer all products in that market for free(BI OLAP, Data Mining, ReportWriting, RealTime BI and ETL) knowing that lost revenues will be made up with the tied/bundled sales of a complimentary product (databases )?
2)Is the above only an antitrust violation when the vendors involved control more than 70% of the complimentary product market (they do: Oracle 41% +IBM 37% + Microsft 13% share of database marketplace) ?
3)Is it an antitrust violation above only if having driven out and bankrupted the existing BI market players, one or several of IBM, Microsoft, and/or Oracle start charging for the formerly free BI components ?
These may all be moot questions in an US administration with a great deal of ambivalence about Antitrust … but not so the European Union.
(c)JBSurveyer 2005