ECIS Accuses Microsoft of Continued Illegal Practices

by , 11:55 AM EST, January 26th, 2007

The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) said on Friday that the same Microsoft illegal practices they complained about three years ago remain in Vista. In addition, the ECIS stated that Microsoft has not fulfilled is interoperability disclosure obligations under the European Commission's March 2004 Decision.

"With Vista, Microsoft has clearly chosen to ignore the fundamental principles of the Commission‘s March 2004 decision," said Simon Awde, ECIS Chairman.

The statement pointed out that Microsoft has created and positioned the XAML markup language, intended to replace HTML, to be dependent on Windows. It also cited Microsoft for the development of the Open XML file format with which Microsoft seeks to supplant the Open Document Format (ODF).

The ECIS, according to their statement, asked Europe's antitrust authority to "put an end to practices that preserve Microsoft‘s existing monopolies and threaten to extend its market dominance into a range of other areas, including Web-based computing and servers."

The ECIS is an international non-profit association that strives to promote competition and consumer choice. The major members include Adobe, Corel, Linspire, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems.