Silicon Insider: Why Google Can't Do Gmail in Europe

This always seems to surprise U.S. companies when they do business in Europe. They assume that the competitive situation is just like here, except perhaps with better food and worse dentistry … and then they get blindsided by virulent attacks in the European media, bizarro world lawsuits and new regulations aimed directly at them, and, in the case of McDonald's, even getting their stores set ablaze. Mickey D's as the symbol of American hegemony … wait, what?

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All of this leaves us Americans scratching our heads. Take the case of Microsoft. Most of us in the tech world were pretty terrified of Gates and his Evil Empire in the 1990s, mainly because nobody seemed to be figuring out a way to effectively compete with that business juggernaut.

But most of us also got over that fear somewhere around 1998, when we realized that personal computer operating systems, even Web browsers, were being eclipsed in importance by Web content, e-commerce and Internet applications.

And these days, when Microsoft most resembles a faded old movie star still trying to conjure up the past, that fear has mostly turned to ridicule, when the company isn't simply ignored.

But that's here. In Europe, keeping with that age-old principle that the enemy who isn't at your feet is at your throat, they've never moved on.

That's why I think it was so surprising to us Yanks when, in 2004, the European Commission handed down an anti-trust ruling against Microsoft demanding that it make available to "open source" software developers all interoperability information regarding its "work group server operating systems." Who cared anymore?

Other than the usual folks who believe all successful corporations are evil, the few U.S. techie types who applauded this decision did so tepidly. After all, did we really want the competitive landscape determined by a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels? And when, in January, four years later, the EU forced Microsoft to pay $1.3 billion in fines and open 30,000 pages of proprietary interface and protocol information, it all seemed both churlish and old news -- like suing Graf Zepplin in 1960 for its one time monopolistic behavior in the dirigible industry.