Mergers and acquisitions happen as a consequences of businesses competing. And ‘the public interest’ requires that businesses shuold compete. Ask your IBM Lotus Notes salesman and your Microsoft Office salesman what they think the respective businesses are doing, and what they should do.

Not very likely that IBM and Microsoft will merge; nor that one will acquire the other. Competition is our mutual destiny.

What does the President of the USA use, and how much of a feather in the cap of the relevant salesman would it be if he switched ?

Competition is alive and well, in the Land of the Free as well as in the lands of the Kings and Queens.

I bet it’s very similar in China. Would anyone from there care to say ?

It does. You need to read between the lines. It claims back the administrative freedom to impose mandatory IT solutions, mind that European Public Services is a centralist concept.

“Why would the EU promote the use of one specific system or solution that would bind governments and their constituents to a specific vendor rather than allowing diversity and choice? I seriously wonder.”

Indeed, that seems to be the objection that would naturally be raised but…

“And one has to wonder who has to gain from such an idea… For sure anyone who has a monopoly or quasi-monopoly would love that. Do you know anyone?”

…that conclusion is actually wrong.

Based on my own test I can assure you that sending a message doesn’t trigger any warning. If it did I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with the opening of your profile for the reason you gave.

It’s the silent aspect that I really object to.

The problem is that you may not be the one sending a message in the first place. It also happens when you answer one. So, imagine you get a message from someone, you’re not sure who that is, what do you do? The natural thing to do is to reply and ask for additional information. Too bad, you just opened your profile to that person…

And in fact, this is documented to be a way to gain access to somebody’s profile: How To View Private Facebook Profiles Pages.

It’s not silent, when sending a mail to someone not part of your friends network, a message is displayed in that effect telling you that this will open your profile to him for a month. I don’t find this particularly problematic, on the contrary, it prevents completely anonymous mails and may deter some moron from harassing other people.