“European antitrust officials are once again probing possible anticompetitive behavior by Microsoft. This time, the allegations concern Microsoft’s core operations and, if they stick, could disrupt the company’s Internet strategy and weaken its dominance of desktop software,” Jennifer L. Schenker reports for BusinessWeek.
“One of the new investigations will probe whether Microsoft, by refusing to disclose key information, is preventing competing products from interoperating with its own Office suite of business applications, the .Net programming language, and other products. The other challenges the legality of bundling Microsoft’s Web browser, Internet Explorer, with its Windows operating system,” Schenker reports.
Schenker reports, “The old case ended up costing Microsoft billions of dollars and forced it to change some practices. But it centered on servers and media players, which are important but fringe businesses for the software giant. Not so with the more recent probes. ‘Microsoft should be concerned because this case addresses core aspects of its business model and the preservation of its core monopolies,’ says Thomas Vinje, a partner at law firm Clifford Chance in Brussels, Belgium, who represents a coalition of tech companies that filed one of the two new complaints. ‘The case has the potential to transform the software industry and give consumers a real choice in desktop operating systems and programs.'”
Much more in the full article here.
