Microsoft Faces Fresh Antitrust Complaints

Rob wrote to mention a Computer Business Online review piece about new anti-trust action against Microsoft on both sides of the Atlantic. From the article: "Other examples of anticompetitive behavior cited by Tangent include bundling of Outlook with Office and Active Directory with Windows Server, as well as the bundling of Windows Media Player and Windows Media Server with its desktop and server operating system respectively. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment on Tangent's complaint, other than to acknowledge that it was being reviewed, but was more forthcoming in responding to a fresh complaint lodged with the European Commission by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS)."

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Also Fresh anti-trust Complaint in *EU*

[sepluv]

I'm not saying that /. is behind (well...I am), but this news is so last week.

The latest news is that, according to Yahoo! News and BBC News, a fresh anti-trust complaint has been filed with the EC against Microsoft by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (composed of IBM, Oracle, RealNetworks, Sun & Nokia). Although the complaint was filed privately, ECIS hinted (see the links) that it related to MS Office.

The story here is about Tangent, a computer manufacturer who filed a federal suit against MS in a Northern Californian court on Valentine's Day. I've found two articles which go into more detail on this: Gameshout and ZDNet.

Basically, the complaints in this suit relate to:

• MS's promotion of its DRM software
• lack of documentation for the MS Office document formats
• pricing of MS software artifically high
• pressurising content owners to use proprietary MS media formats
• server interoperability (see the original EC case for which MS are currently being fined $2.8M daily).