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EU coalition hits out at Vista
Microsoft 'still up to its bully-boy tricks', says Ecis...

By Reuters

Published: Friday 26 January 2007

A coalition of Microsoft's rivals has charged that its new Vista operating system will perpetuate practices found illegal in the European Union nearly three years ago.

The European Commission found in 2004 that Microsoft used its dominance to muscle out RealNetworks and other makers of audio and video streaming software and that it made its desktop Windows deliberately incompatible with rivals' server software.

Simon Awde, chairman of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (Ecis) said: "Microsoft has clearly chosen to ignore the fundamental principles of the Commission's March 2004 decision."

The group of complainants includes Adobe, Corel, IBM, Linspire, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems.

The Commission said it was studying the complaint. Microsoft had no immediate comment on the statement.

Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system is due for formal release on Tuesday, including a major rollout in Brussels, complete with a news conference and party.

The Ecis statement said: "Vista is the first step of Microsoft's strategy to extend its market dominance to the internet."

It said Microsoft's XAML mark-up language was "positioned to replace HTML", the industry standard for publishing documents on the internet.

Microsoft's own language would be dependent on Windows, and discriminatory against rival systems such as Linux, the group said.

They said a so-called "open XML" platform file format, known as OOXML, is designed to run seamlessly only on the Microsoft Office platform.

Thomas Vinje, lawyer for Ecis, said in the statement: "The end result will be the continued absence of any real consumer choice, years of waiting for Microsoft to improve - or even debug - its monopoly products and of course high prices."

Microsoft has challenged the 2004 decision, which included a record fine of nearly €500m and orders to change its business practices. It awaits a decision by the EU's Court of First Instance.