EU says rejects Microsoft suggestion it is holding up Vista launch
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The EU executive commission rejected what it said had been a suggestion from US software giant Microsoft that it was delaying the launch of Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system in Europe.
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Microsoft MSFT.O said on Tuesday   that it hopes the European Commission will not require the   removal of important security features in Europe for its new   Windows Vista operating system.
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Software giant Microsoft Corp. will for the first time be forced by antitrust regulators to change how it designs and sells its widely used Windows operating system, after a European Union judge Wednesday rejected the company's bid to postpone sanctions against it.- washingtonpost.com
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InfoWorld - Microsoft officials deny that the&#160;Department of Transportation's recent moratorium&#160;on adoption of Windows Vista is indicative of any widespread reluctance in the government sector to install the new operating system.
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A European Union court on Wednesday upheld penalties imposed by the EU executive on Microsoft, dismissing the software giant's appeal for a suspension, according to a document obtained by Reuters.
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A European Union court on Wednesday  confirmed it had upheld curbs imposed by the EU's executive on  Microsoft, dismissing the software giant's appeal for a  suspension.
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Computer giant Microsoft will not appeal against an EU order forcing it to provide a stripped-down version of its Windows operating system.
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(InfoWorld) - Four European Parliament members warned the European Commission that its actions toward Microsoft could endanger the competitiveness of European businesses by delaying the release of Vista, Microsoft's next operating system. In a strongly worded letter submitted Thursday to Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, the legislators said Microsoft regards the E.U.'s regulatory actions as a "risk factor." Microsoft used the terminology in its annual report filed Aug. 25 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). "This effectively means that the Commission's actions are endangering the ability of European business to compete globally," the legislators wrote. The letter is signed by U.K. representatives Chris Heaton-Harris, Sharon Bowles and Peter Skinner, plus Michal Kaminski of Poland. Microsoft wrote in the SEC filing that its ongoing appeal of European Commission's March 2004 antitrust decision means there's uncertainty over the legal principles regarding product design in the European market. "These uncertainties could ... delay release dates for Windows or other products," the SEC filing read. Microsoft has provided copies of Vista to the Commission along with technical information, said spokesman Tom Brookes. The Commission, he said, has raised concerns regarding complaints by competitors. In March, the Commission sent a letter to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, saying it was concerned about certain functions in Vista and how compatible the OS would be with products from other software companies. European Commission representatives were not immediately available for comment regarding Thursday's letter. Brookes said Microsoft was unaware of the letter until this morning. Two of the legislators said their letter is based on information contained in the company's SEC filing. Heaton-Harris referred questions to Microsoft, regarding why the company thought the E.U. might cause a delay Vista's shipping date. Microsoft has said Vista will be ready for corporate customers in November and consumers in January. Bowles said she has participated in informal sessions where Commission members have acknowledged they are watching Microsoft's development of Vista closely. She said she had no specific information on what the Commission is currently doing, as few details are publicly released. However, the Commission's actions have prompted concern among small to medium-size businesses in Europe, worried that the E.U. could potentially delay Vista's release, putting them at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world, Bowles said. "That climate of uncertainty caused through competition policy and actions already taken ... are meaning that Europe is being deprived," Bowles said. Europe is in the middle of a 10-year plan, called the Lisbon Agenda, to increase the continent's competitiveness in technology. The legislators wrote that they are concerned the Commission's actions toward Microsoft are undermining Europe's moves to become a knowledge-driven economy. Microsoft and the Commission have locked horns over how the company is complying with the March 2004 antitrust decision. TheÂ Commission fined MicrosoftÂ â¬280.5 million ($357 million at the time) in July for failing to provide technical documentation for certain protocols used by its server products. The Commission required disclosure of the protocols to allow competitors to develop compatible products.Â Microsoft is appealing. Microsoft is also appealing the entire March 2004 decision, in which it was fined â¬497 million ($613 million at the time), before the European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg.
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More of the same Microsoft has warned European PC users face an even longer wait for Windows Vista if EU antitrust regulators mandate further changes for the delayed operating system.â¦
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The European Union&#39;s executive arm ruled out fresh negotiations with Microsoft to settle an anti-trust case after an EU court upheld its sanctions against the software giant.
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A European Union court on Wednesday confirmed it had upheld curbs imposed by the EU&#39;s executive on Microsoft, dismissing the software giant&#39;s appeal for a suspension.
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The European Union&#39;s Court of First Instance has rejected Microsoft&#39;s appeal of the European Commission&#39;s 2004 landmark antitrust decision against the company, which concluded that the software giant had abused its dominant position in the computer industry &quot;by leveraging its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems.&quot;
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A Luxembourg-based European courton Wednesday turned down an appeal by Microsoft to delay sanctions imposed on the software giant by the European Commission (EC), the executive arm of the European Union (EU).
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(InfoWorld) - As Windows VistaÂ appeared in computer stores worldwide, Microsoft said Tuesday that part of the design of the new operating system is the work of the European Commission. "Following discussions with European Commission, Microsoft committed to make a number of changes to the Windows Vista operating system prior to release," the software maker said in a statement, pointing to three functions of the operating system: security, search, and fixed document formats. Windows Security Center (WSC), which looks like a dashboard, gives the user an overview of what security software is running on the system and the status of checks and upgrades of firewalls and antispyware protection. Rival security software firms and the Commission suspected this could give WSC an unfair advantage. Microsoft said it agreed to develop a new set of APIsÂ for release in the first service pack, scheduled for later this year, which can be invoked by third-party security programs to turn off the alerts presented by WSC. Similarly, PatchGuard -- software that protects against the modification of the kernel of the operating system -- has been added to Vista. Some security vendors have in the past made modifications to the kernel as part of the implementation of their security software. PatchGuard prevents such modifications in the 64-bit version. Microsoft is now working with vendors to develop new kernel-level APIs that will provide programmatic access to the kernel to address this issue, Microsoft said. The APIs will be available in Windows Vista 64 with the first service pack, scheduled for later this year. Regarding search, Microsoft has changed the way default settings are made for Internet search within both Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). "These changes now ensure for users that they are able -- through a series of windows and options -- to make a clear, conscious, and open decision on their default search provider. Furthermore, users will retain at all times the ability to change this and all further defaults in the operating system at will," Microsoft said. Microsoft's own fixed document format software is known as XPS. "In response to the Commission's concerns, the company has made fundamental changes to the licensing structure of the XPS fixed-format technology and has committed to submit the technology to an international standards body for adoption as an open industry standard," Microsoft said. The XPS standard will be made available under licensing terms that do not exclude any industry or licensing model including the GPL (general public license), it said. "In response to Commissioner Kroes' letter of March 2006, Microsoft created a singleÂ API so that independent software developers can create applications to allow users to save documents in XPS or other formats, such as Adobe's PDF," Microsoft said. Microsoft said it has also disclosed through a licensing program the relevant information to enable the implementation of XPS technology on competing client and server operating systems. Microsoft has also responded to a further Commission demand to submit XPS (as well as future extensions) to a standards-setting body. Microsoft will submit XPS to the Ecma International. Microsoft said it will also enable the implementation of XPS under an open-source business model (GPL) through use of a covenant not to sue -- a model that Microsoft has applied to Web services and open XMLÂ  document formats and that has, it said, "been welcomed by the open-source community." European customers and OEMs will be able to buy a version of Vista that has Microsoft's Media Player stripped out. This unbundled version of the operating system complies with the 2004 European antitrust ruling, which ordered the company to offer two separate versions of both the home and professional versions of the operating system. "In compliance with the European Commission's decision of March 2004, home and professional editions of Windows Vista without Media Player functionality will be released in Europe on the same schedule as the Windows Vista general availability launch," Microsoft said. These are called the 'N' versions -- denoting "no media player," the company said.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft officials deny that theÂ Department of Transportation's recent moratoriumÂ on adoption of Windows Vista is indicative of any widespread reluctance in the government sector to install the new operating system. In a report that was circulated internally within the department by DOT Chief Information Officer Daniel Mintz in late January 2007, that only surfaced publicly on March 5, the IT manager placed an indefinite halt on procurement of the software and any planned desktopÂ upgrades to Vista Among the reasons cited by Mintz in ceasing any deployment of the newest OS from Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft were questions about its compatibility with other programs, including earlier versions of Windows, and the estimated costs for moving to Vista. Despite the setback, Microsoft executives claim that Vista adoption is moving forward at a consistent pace in the government sector, and on par with similar installations among private industry. Although aware of the budgetary and scheduling conflicts that often cause the federal government to lag behind businesses in bringing onboard major new platforms, Microsoft contends that the OS is already finding a home in the space. "We're wrapping up the largest early adoption program for the windows OS ever, and over ten percent of our partners were from the federal government," said Patrick Svenburg, Windows client solution specialist with the Microsoft Federal group. "This also represented our largest partnership ever with the federal government; we worked closely with them throughout the entire development cycle to address their concerns and priorities." Svenburg said that Microsoft is planning to host senior officials from the Department of Transportation in Redmond before the end of March to address the concerns the department expects to encounter in moving to the OS. In his memo, Mintz specifically cited "lack of a compelling business case" as his rationale for temporarily banning the move to Vista, along with Microsoft Office 2007 and the Internet Explorer 7 browser. To be fair, Mintz and other DOT officials attributed some of the department's reluctance to upgrade on the agency's planned move to a new Washington headquarters later this year. The DOT technology executive didn't immediately respond to calls seeking further comment on the Vista moratorium. Microsoft representatives said that like many of its largest, Enterprise Agreement-level customers, government organizations such as the Transportation Department will need to avail themselves of the software maker's compatibility and deployment automation programs to help overcome some of the perceived challenges with Vista deployment. Some industry watchers believe, however, Â that it may still be hard for many federal agencies to make a sufficient business case for spending the time and money needed to move to the platform. Specifically, most of the major departments have invested heavily in moving their critical applications to Web-based systems, which could serve to dampen enthusiasm and demand for migration to the new OS and productivity suite, said Shawn McCarthy, a government IT analyst with IDC, based in Framingham, Mass. "A lot of government sites have been trying to migrate more applications to Web interfaces that any desktop system can access, and that's taken pressure off the organizations on the client side," McCarthy said. "The individual agencies are under a lot of pressure to make a business case anytime they want to do systems upgrades; if they can't really justify with benefit that will be seen, the upgrade either doesn't happen or migration is slower." The analyst said that despite Microsoft's claims that features such as improved security will convince government CIOs to get behind adoption of Vista, federal decision-makers will take a wait-and-see attitude toward the product and hold-off on moving over until the operating system's advantages are proven by others. Other experts said that it's too early to pass judgment on government or private-sector adoption of Vista since large organizations don't typically move to new technologies quickly. Michael Cherry, analyst with independent research firm Directions On Microsoft, based in Kirkland, Wash., said that the Transportation Department and other agencies will likely move to Vista incrementally over time. Organizations will also need to spend valuable time and money doing extensive evaluations of the OS before any installation begins, which could push back adoption further, he said. "When I read the [DOT] memo, I heard an IT department asking its people to refrain from buying ad hoc Vista licenses and machines, because they can't support that yet," said Cherry. "Something else to consider is that IT people have a lot of projects that they're already working and limited resources; Vista is not the kind of thing that merits dropping everything else to move on it quickly." Cherry said that he does believe federal agencies will begin adopting the OS at the same rate that they retire older desktop systems, although he noted that IT departments will likely give more consideration than ever before to alternatives including open source and Apple products. The first types of government users the analyst believes are likely to install Vista for functional reasons will be employees who carry sensitive data on their laptops, or view such information remotely on their PCs, he said. Those users will be seeking the onboard protection offered by the BitLocker encryption feature of Vista, according to the expert. In general he believes it's too soon for anyone to worry about adoption of the new OS. "It's way too soon to be taking individual cases or data points and trying to make a trend of them," Cherry said. "Vista might be good, but it's not so good people are going to dump their existing machines overnight just to get it."
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Microsoft  raised the  possibility on Thursday that it might delay the introduction of  its new Vista Windows operating system in Europe, depending on  antitrust requirements of the European Commission.
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PARIS, Sept. 17 -- A European Union court Monday rejected Microsoft's appeal of a European antitrust order requiring it to share software information with rivals and pay a record $690 million in fines for quashing competition.