DOJ, states concerned about Vista docs in antitrust case
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The Department of Justice and state attorneys general are raising questions about changes Microsoft wants to make in the schedule set out for its antitrust compliance.
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Symantec and Adobe complain to the European Commission about Vista security and electronic document features.
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InfoWorld - The European Commission warned Microsoft again Tuesday that planned security features in the upcoming Windows Vista operating system could run afoul of EU antitrust laws, prompting Microsoft to say that an adverse ruling from European regulators could further delay Vista's ship date.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft tried to dazzle the antitrust regulators in Brussels on Thursday with new research that illustrates how immense the effect of Windows Vista will be next year on Europe's IT industry and the broader economy. Microsoft warnedÂ earlier this week that the launch of Vista might be delayed in Europe because of the regulators' concerns about its impact on competition. On Thursday it used research conducted by IDC -- and sponsored by Microsoft -- to illustrate how much Vista is set to benefit Europe in terms of revenues and jobs next year. Within a year of going on sale, IDC said, Windows Vista will be installed on more than 30 million computers in the six E.U. countries included in the study: Germany, France, the U.K., Spain, Poland and Denmark. More than 100 million computers worldwide will run Vista within a year of its launch. The predictions come from a research paper titled "The economic impact of Microsoft Windows Vista." Vista-related employment will account for more than 20 percent of all IT jobs within a year of its arrival, IDC predicted. That translates into around one million IT professionals in the six countries, including 100,000 new jobs by the end of 2007, assuming that Vista is launched on time at the beginning of next year. The European Commission, Europe's top antitrust regulator, is concerned that new features planned for Vista, like its improved security software, willÂ fall foul of the same antitrust rulesÂ the company was found guilty of breaching two and a half years ago with its bundling of Windows Media Player. Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, said the impact of Vista will be much greater than the direct benefits to Microsoft. "The economic opportunity Windows Vista creates for small and large companies across the region is clearly much more significant," he said at a press conference to unveil the study. But some commentators saw the unveiling of the IDC research as a way of pressuring the Commission to back off. Last week, four members of the European Parliament wrote to competition commissioner Neelie Kroes warning her not to scupper the launch of Vista. "It looks like operation shock and awe," said one person following Microsoft's antitrust travails in Europe, who asked not to be named. Microsoft is "losing the legal argument, so it's turning to political means to maintain its abusive monopoly," said the person, who is close to some of Microsoft's nearest competitors. For every euro ($1.27) Microsoft generates in its own revenues from Vista, other firms in the six countries that are involved in distributing the OS, building applications for it or servicing computers using Vista will generate â¬14 (17.76) in sales, IDC said. These companies should sell "over â¬32 billion ($40.6 billion) in products and services revolving around Windows Vista," IDC said. "Rapid and widespread adoption of Windows Vista means that its launch ... will have a pronounced positive impact on local economies throughout Europe," IDC said. The six countries in the study account for over 65 percent of all IT spending in the European Union, Croatia, Norway, and Switzerland. (IDC is owned by International Data Group, the parent company of IDG News Service.)
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It's no surprise that Symantec and Adobe are wary of Microsoft bundling its own security software and electronic document format in Windows Vista, but the companies had yet to lodge official complaints about the operating system until now.
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By Therese Poletti, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Mar. 6--Intel said it may not be able to provide all the electronic documents that rival Advanced Micro Devices is requesting in an antitrust lawsuit because of human error.   In a letter Monday to U.S.
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Four states concerned about Microsoft Corp.'s market power are pressing a federal court to extend by five years its oversight of the software company, which began in 2002 as part of a landmark antitrust settlement.
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WASHINGTON -- The judge overseeing Microsoft Corp.'s antitrust settlement said Tuesday she would not immediately address complaints Google Inc. has made about Microsoft's Windows Vista software.
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(InfoWorld) - Google has complained to federal antitrust officials that the search tool in Microsoft'sÂ Windows VistaÂ Â discourages customers from using its own search utility, the company confirmed Sunday. Stories posted to the Web sites of The New York Times (registration required)Â and theÂ Seattle Post-IntelligencerÂ SaturdayÂ first revealedÂ that Google's complaint centered on Vista's built-in desktop search software, dubbed Instant Search. According to both newspapers, Google accused Microsoft of designing Vista to discourage users from running its indexing and search software. On Sunday, Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes confirmed the charge. "Microsoft's current approach with Vista desktop search violates its agreement with the government and hurts consumers." he said in an e-mail to Computerworld. "The search boxes built throughout Vista are hard-wired to Microsoft's own desktop search product, with no way for users to choose an alternate provider from these visible search access points. Likewise, Vista makes it impractical to turn off Microsoft's search index." According to postings on Microsoft's support forums, the only way to completely disable Vista's search is to stop the Windows Search service in the Microsoft Management Console. Microsoft disputed Google's charges. "We've been working with state and federal antitrust officials for the past two years to ensure that there are no problems with any of the features in Windows Vista," said company spokesman Jack Evans. "These desktop search issues were reviewed at length with regulators prior to the release of Windows Vista and resulted in more than a dozen changes at their request." Even so, Microsoft will consider more changes to Vista, Evans added. "While we donât believe there are any compliance concerns with desktop search, we are committed to going the extra mile to resolve this issue, so long as the changes Google is requesting do nothing to undermine the privacy and security of computer users." During aÂ March 2007 hearingÂ conducted by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the 2002 Microsoft consent decree, the government's status report noted that a complaint had been filed, but did not identify the company. "At the last status conference, plaintiffs reported that they had just received a middleware-related complaint," theÂ status reportÂ read. "Since then, plaintiffs have been investigating this complaint, including obtaining significant additional information from Microsoft and the complainant." Google had previously raised concerns about search in Microsoft'sÂ Internet Explorer 7Â browser with federal officials. In May 2006, however,Â federal officials rebuffed Google, saying that IE 7 users could easily switch search providers and that computer makers could set the default search engine in IE 7 before shipping systems. Google has also filed similar complaints over search in both IE 7 and Vista with the European Union's antitrust commission. Those complaints have not been settled. According to The New York Times, the U.S. Department of Justice refused to pursue the Google complaint, andÂ Thomas Barnett,Â the assistant U.S. attorney general for antitrust, sent a memo to numerous state attorneys general in May asking them to also reject the complaint. Prosecutors in several of those states, however, have reportedly decided to investigate the Google concerns whether the federal government goes along or not, a decision that has Barnett reconsidering the agency's position. E-mails and phone calls asking several of the states involved with the 2004 Microsoft settlement to comment were not returned Sunday. Barnett's division will present its next report on Microsoft's progress in meeting the 2002 settlement to Kollar-Kotelly in a hearing scheduled for June 26. Â
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A seemingly simple case regarding whether Microsoft had the right to replicate speech recognition software it had licensed -- or rather, thought it had licensed -- from AT&T, and then sell that software abroad as a component of Windows Vista, has exploded into what is now extremely likely to become a landmark case in US patent and copyright law.
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Four states that recently said the U.S. federal judgment in the Microsoft antitrust case has done its job have made an about face, now joining&#160;other states asking for an extension of the judgment.
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Microsoft isn't quite begging, but the company is hoping a European court will cut it some major slack in its fight against an antitrust ruling, citing concerns that PC users will get the short end of the stick. -washingtonpost.com
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(InfoWorld) - Plaintiffs in the U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft disagreed sharply on whether the company should be released from the rules put in place by a 2002 consent decree, legal filings revealed Thursday. Key parts of the consent decree -- which grew out of the 2002 antitrust settlement struck with Microsoft by the U.S. Department of Justice and 20 states -- are scheduled to expire Nov. 12. Those rules, which have been overseen by U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, spell out prohibitions against Microsoft -- including ones that bar it from retaliating against manufacturers -- as well as requirements, such as one that demands the company disclose APIs to competitors so they can make their software run more smoothly with Windows. Reports filed to Kollar-Kotelly Thursday show that regulators are split in their opinions of the decree's effectiveness and whether it should be extended past Nov. 12. On one side, the U.S. Department of Justice and five states -- New York, Louisiana, Maryland, Ohio, and Wisconsin -- told Kollar-Kotelly that the decree had done its job. "The United States and the New York group respectively submit that the final judgments have achieved [their] goals," the group's report read. Thomas Barnett, the assistant attorney general who heads the Justice Department's antitrust division, was more specific. "The final judgments have been successful in preventing Microsoft from continuing the type of exclusionary behavior that led to the original lawsuit," he said in a statement. Six states and the District of Columbia, all part of the group that rejected the settlement when it was first proposed by the Department of Justice in 2001, sharply dissented. Lead by California, the group -- which also includes D.C., Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, and Massachusetts -- said Microsoft's grip on the industry was as strong as ever. "There can be little doubt that Microsoft's market power remains undiminished and that key provisions of the final judgment have had little or no competitively significant impact. "Microsoft's commingling violation has not been effectively addressed, Microsoft remains in possession of the fruits of its violation, and the competitive conditions antedating Microsoft's anticompetitive conduct have not been restored," the California group said in its filing. "The final judgment clearly has had little or no discernible impact in the marketplace as measured by the most commonly used metric, market shares," the group said. Its report then went on to cite sources, including research firm IDC, to show that in some cases -- server operating system share, for example -- Microsoft's slice has grown dramatically. Not surprisingly, Microsoft reached a different conclusion in its report filed Thursday. "The final judgments created an environment in which market forces can determine the relative success and thus the market shares of participants," the company said. "Measured by that standard, the final judgments have been a success." Earlier this year, Kollar-Kotelly told the plaintiffs that she didn't want last-minute objections to the Nov. 12 expiration, prompting them to file now. A status hearing before Kollar-Kotelly on Sept. 11 -- the next-to-last such hearing scheduled before the decree is set to lapse -- also played a part in the timing. Hints that the California contingent would argue that Microsoft's probation should be extended came this morning in the Los Angeles Times, which quoted California Attorney General Jerry Brown as saying that the 2002 settlement "has not been all that effective." Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, disagreed. "As it was specifically intended, the consent decree defined clear rules for how Microsoft competes without preordaining winners in the technology marketplace," Smith said in a statement. "The consent decree 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." In July 2006, Microsoft published a three-principle, 12-tenet manifesto dubbed "Windows Principles: Twelve Tenets to Promote Competition" that it promised to abide by. The first principle on the list: "Choice for Computer Manufacturers and Customers." California and its fellow states shot back. "These 'Windows Principles' are, of course, completely voluntary, and it is unclear whether they are simply a public relations gesture or something more substantive," the group's report stated. Kollar-Kotelly will hear arguments from the parties at the Sept. 11 meeting; at some point after that, but presumably before Nov. 12, she is expected to render her decision. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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WASHINGTON - A U.S. district court judge on Wednesday praised Microsoft for efforts to improve technical documentation for its communications protocols, but questioned the effect in the marketplace of her final judgment in the U.S. government's antitrust case against the software giant.
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In upholding Europe's landmark antitrust decision, a high-level court foresees a "significant drop" in market share. But what of Vista?
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Justices quiz attorneys of foes Microsoft and AT&#38;T on whether U.S. software makers are liable for code used abroad.
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Google Inc. is arguing that Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista violates a 2002 antitrust settlement because its indexing software is hard to turn off. But an expert says indexing can be disabled easily.