Q&A: Microsoft anti-trust verdict
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Microsoft has lost on all key points in its competition dispute with the European Commission - but what is the impact of the ruling?
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(InfoWorld) - The 2002 antitrust settlement between Microsoft and the U.S. government has yielded several benefits for consumers with competing Web browsers, multimedia applications, and Web-based services flourishing since the agreement, the U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday. The DOJ, in an 11-page report, said the settlement seems to be working, despite questions from critics. "There have been a number of developments in the competitive landscape ... that suggest that the Final Judgments are accomplishing their stated goal of fostering competitive conditions among middleware products, unimpeded by anticompetitive exclusionary obstacles erected by Microsoft," said the report, from the DOJ and the group of states led by New York that sued the company. Among the DOJ's evidence that the settlement is working: Increased competition to Internet Explorer from other Web browsers, such as Firefox and Opera; the popularity of Apple's iTunes and QuickTime and Adobe's Flash for handling multimedia content; the increasing use of Web-based services for e-mail and other applications; and the decisions by hardware vendors like DellÂ to offer Linux preloaded on their computers. Apple introduced QuickTime in 1991, long before the antitrust lawsuit. Hardware vendors have been preloading Linux on computers dating back to the late '90s. "To be sure, none of the products mentioned ... have to date resulted in a dramatic reduction in Microsoft's PC operation system market share," the DOJ report said. "The Final Judgements were targeted to reinvigorating competitive conditions that Microsoft had suppressed, not to slicing off some part of Windows' market share." Microsoft, in a statement, said the judgment has fostered competition. The judgment "defined clear rules for how Microsoft competes without preordaining winners in the technology marketplace," Brad Smith, Microsoft's senior vice president and general counsel, said in the statement. "The [judgment] shaped how we view our responsibilities and led us to adopt a set of voluntary principles that will continue to apply even after major parts of the U.S. antitrust ruling expire this November." The judgment and competitive principles Microsoft has adopted "provide the industry and consumers with the benefits of ongoing innovation by Microsoft, while creating and preserving robust opportunities for competition," Smith added. Microsoft, in its own antitrust status report issued Thursday, said competing middleware products continue to "proliferate." Seven top PC makers preinstall an average of 35 non-Microsoft software products before shipping them out, the Microsoft report said. Other groups have questioned the benefits of the settlement. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has at times questioned the benefits, even though she approved the judgment. In a hearing in February 2005, Kollar-Kotelly questioned "what, if any, effect" the judgment has had on the software market. Another group of states led by California that also sued Microsoft and has been critical of the judgment is scheduled to release its own report by Friday. A status report on Microsoft's antitrust compliance is scheduled before Kollar-Kotelly on Sept. 11.
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A European court on Wednesday ruled against Microsoft in its long-running antitrust confrontation with the European Commission over the company&#39;s Windows software.
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Microsoft lost its antitrust appeal.  Will this change anything?
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A court ruling this week gives European Union trustbusters the upper hand in their long battle with Microsoft. The company reluctantly started dismantling the practice that
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Analysis No delay in EC anti-trust compliance
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BREAKING NEWS - The European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg has ruled against Microsoft in its appeal of a March 2004 finding of the European Commission. In so doing, the Court upholds the EC's finding that Microsoft abused its dominant market position in Europe, first by failing to supply access to its protocols for enabling interoperability with its communications software in Windows and Windows Server, and second by bundling its Media Player with Windows XP.
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Is Microsoft's anti-malware giveaway part of a master plan to flush out software pirates?
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What don't they want us to see? Last week Microsoft settled its only outstanding antitrust case, a class action lawsuit brought in Iowa.â¦
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Towel thrown in Microsoft has finally blinked in its three-year stare-out contest with the European Commission. Today the firm said it would not launch another appeal against the landmark â¬497m anti-trust fine slapped on it in 2004.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - As judgment day in the nine-year-long antitrust battle between Microsoft and the European Commission draws near, neither side in the protracted dispute knows for sure how it will react to the news on the day. Although the date of the ruling by the European Court of First Instance has been public since July, the European commissioner in charge of competition, Neelie Kroes, still hasn't decided whether she will hold a press conference on Monday. Meanwhile, Tom Brookes, a Microsoft spokesman, said the company is waiting until Monday morning before finalizing plans for addressing the rank's journalists from around the world gathering in Luxembourg, the court's location, and Brussels and who are eager to place "winner" and "loser" tags on the adversaries. "How much can you prepare for an outcome you don't know?" Brookes said. "Clearly Mrs. Kroes isn't going to give a press conference if the Commission loses outright," said Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd. Microsoft's appeal against the Commission's 2004 antitrust ruling is the biggest event in the working lives of everyone directly involved. They know that Monday's outcome will influence the software industry's future and will be a reference in all future European antitrust cases, especially ones in the fast-changing world of IT. From Microsoft's perspective, it will determine "under what circumstances market-leading companies can improve their products for consumers," said Erich Andersen, vice president and associate general counsel for Microsoft in Europe, in a statement. "The issue here is whether Microsoft should be able to regulate the market from a superdominant position, or whether the market should determine which products should gain access to consumers," countered Todd in a telephone interview. Both sides also know that how the outcome is perceived in the press is almost as important as the actual outcome, which is likely to be hundreds of pages in length, devilishly nuanced, and highly complex. Most people expect several versions of the court ruling to appear in the media on Monday. Initial reports will emerge shortly after the ruling is made public at 9:30 a.m. local time, and will probably focus on whether the Commission has to repay any or all of the â¬497 million ($685 million) fine it imposed on Microsoft in 2004. Repaying the fine will be seen as evidence that Microsoft's appeal against the 2004 Commission ruling was successful. Letting the fine stand will be viewed as a Microsoft loss. But what happens to the fine is the least important aspect of Monday's ruling, according to Thomas Vinje, a partner in the law firm Clifford Chance, who heads the legal team of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), a Commission ally. "It's the least relevant yardstick," Vinje said. "Far more important is how the judges assess individual facts and points of law because this will determine what legal precedents can be gleaned from this case." A senior lawyer on Microsoft's side agreed. "If the court reduces the fine on Microsoft, saying that the anticompetitive behavior isn't so serious, but upholds the Commission's broad argument, then a lawyer in a year's time dealing with a different antitrust case will be more interested in what the court specifically said than in whether the fine was reduced or not," he said, asking not to be named. Journalists will largely be dependent on lawyers' interpretations of the document, which won't come out until some time after the initial ruling. The story may well change dramatically during the day, once details of the ruling emerge, possibly even reversing a superficial initial assessment of who won or lost. The finest legal minds involved on both sides will pore over the document looking for ways to claim victory and to shape perceptions of the ruling. Microsoft appealed both strands in the Commission's landmark 2004 ruling, which concluded that Microsoft was abusing the dominant position of its Windows operating system in order to muscle in on other sectors of the software market. The Commission concluded that Microsoft was competing unfairly against other vendors by bundling its Media Player multimedia software in Windows. The Commission also ruled that Microsoft monopolized the market for low-end server operating systems by failing to reveal interoperability information to rivals. Last April the court held a three-day hearing during which the Commission and Microsoft, together with their software industry allies, tried to convince the judges of their arguments. Observers foresee four possible outcomes on Monday, the first two clear-cut but unlikely, the other two mixed and therefore more probable. The court could side with the Commission on both sides of the case. It might deem Microsoft an obstacle to innovation in the software industry and order the immediate breakup of the company, effectively appropriating the Windows operating system and making it a public utility. In the second clear-cut scenario, the court sides with Microsoft on both counts and declares that the rapidly changing IT industry is defined by a string of monopolies and that one monopoly is inevitably overtaken by another in time. More likely, the court may side with the Commission on the interoperability side but uphold Microsoft's appeal against the bundling ruling. Microsoft may be ordered to release all interoperability information to rivals immediately. This result would open up Office-related markets to open source software rivals. However, Microsoft would no longer need to sell a version of Windows without Media Player, and it would most probably bundle more and more features onto Windows in the future, to the likely detriment of any halfway successful innovation from a rival, such as Google. Alternatively, Microsoft may lose the bundling argument but win on the interoperability side. The Court may order Microsoft to set up a separate company to sell a completely unbundled version of Windows. This entity would be free to compete with the fully bundled version and strike partnerships with other software developers. If the third scenario prevails, then Microsoft could face a string of lawsuits in Europe. The Commission is already examining an ECIS complaint that claims Microsoft has stifled competition in the market for office tools software by failing to allow rival software from interoperating properly with Microsoft Office. "Victory on the interoperability side of the case on Monday would put wind in our sails," said the ECIS's Vinje. But a loss would put a swift end to a new attack, and any others that might lie in waiting for Monday's outcome. "Monday's ruling will have a huge effect on how the ECIS complaint is dealt with," Todd said.
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Microsoft seems to not have learned much from the antitrust suits brought against it.
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With the ink barely dry on Microsoft's acquisition of antispyware company Giant Company Software questions have arisen about the ownership of the antispyware code Microsoft bought.
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Split decision possible The European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg will rule on Monday whether the guilty verdict against Microsoft should be overturned.â¦
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A US jury found that Microsoft infringed audio patents held by the world's biggest software maker Alcatel-Lucent.   Microsoft has been ordered to pay Pounds 778m in damages, however the firm says it may appeal the ruling.   It says the verdict is unsupported by the law or the facts.
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A top European court on Monday handed Microsoft a surprise defeat in its epic antitrust battles, backing the European Commission&#39;s 2004 record fine of 497 million euros (690 million dollars) against the software giant.
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I can't urge you strongly enough to read the article entitled How Vista Lets Microsoft Lock Users In. It details how Microsoft has built into Vista the "trusted computing" ability to lock down Office files via DRM such that no unauthorized document reader will be able to decrypt and read them. This is perhaps one of the biggest hidden weapons Microsoft has in its arsenal that could sabotage Linux and OpenOffice.org if Microsoft succeeds in its attempt to plug SUSE and all Novell's "interoperability" bonuses.   Think of this, if you will, as the Tivoization of Office files, only with malicious intent.  Microsoft could, indeed, open up the document format completely and swear before God that it will never sue anyone for patent infringement.  However, this does not prevent Microsoft from locking Office files in such a way that only Vista users can read them.  No one else will be able to do so without the proper authorization, thus rendering the open format and Microsoft compatibility entirely meaningless.