by , 11:00 AM EST, February 12th, 2003
Microsoft must be feeling extremely unloved these days. It has barely had time to breathe a sigh of relief over the sweetheart deal worked out in the US's DoJ anti-trust lawsuit against it. Now the company has to deal with an attack from another direction. The Guardian Unlimited is reporting that a group of software companies is collectively lodging a new lawsuit against Microsoft over its Windows XP operating system. There is currently another lawsuit in the European courts that targets other Microsoft OSes, like NT and Windows 98.
The group bringing the suit is a trade group called Computer and Communications Industry Association. Among its membership is Microsoft competitors like AOL, Sun, Oracle, Intuit, Yahoo!, and a host of other companies that compete less directly with Big Redmond. Notably absent from the list of member companies is Apple.
From the article titled Microsoft under fire on two fronts in Europe:
Microsoft is to be forced to fight its regulatory battles in Europe on two fronts after a powerful coalition of technology companies disclosed yesterday that it had lodged a fresh complaint against the software group with the European commission.
The move, which centres on the firm's XP version of its Windows operating system, comes at a sensitive time for Microsoft.
A separate investigation by the commission into the firm's alleged abuse of its dominant position involving an older version of Windows is expected to be completed in the first half of this year.
In a fresh move yesterday the Washington-based Computer and Communications Industry Association - which represents firms such as Oracle, Sun Microsystems and AOL Time Warner - claimed Microsoft had bundled so many hi-tech products into the XP Windows package that rivals were unable to compete.
"Windows XP takes Microsoft's abusive practices to a new level, illegally protecting Microsoft's existing monopolies and ... illegally eliminating competition in new software and service markets," the CCIA said.
The software is also biased towards Microsoft's products, it was claimed, making life difficult for competing products.
The lawsuit could potentially lighten Microsoft's coffers substantially. According to the article, Microsoft could be fined up to 10 percent of its global profits, more than $30 billion.
Stop by The Guardian Unlimited for the full story.
Jim Desler, a spokesman for the Seattle firm, described the complaint as "old arguments and allegations rehashed by a group that is cynically trying to influence the process."
"It would be nice if they could work constructively with the rest of the industry rather than focus exclusively on complaints and litigation," he said.
This statement from a company who had to be forced to comply with industry standards concerning Java and continues to use its monopoly muscle to work towards creating an Internet environment that only Windows users can use.
We would think that a company being so harassed would be sensitive about how it did its business, that it would try to be more proactive in addressing any actions that even hint at being monopolistic. We would think that, and you might think that, but such thoughts apparently do not appeal to the likes of Microsoft, so lawsuits such as these are inevitable.