Microsoft Will Cooperate
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For its part, a Microsoft spokesperson would only say that it will cooperate
fully with the commission's investigation and provide any and all information
necessary.
But the two investigations do not focus on peripheral functionalities such as the media players, as others have done, but rather on the core of Microsoft's business: its operating and office suite software, Andy Updegrove, a partner with Boston law firm Gesmer Updegrove LLP, said in his ConsortiumInfo.org standards blog.
"Both investigations focus on the benefits that Microsoft gains by combining
features, such as search and Windows Live, into its operating system. But
the investigation sparked by the Opera complaint also includes some novel and
interesting features, based upon Opera's contention that Microsoft's failure to
conform Internet Explorer to prevailing open standards puts its competitors at
a disadvantage," Updegrove said in the blog post.
The investigations will also look
into whether Microsoft has failed to adequately open up its Office Open XML file
format, or to take adequate measures to ensure that Office is sufficiently
interoperable with competing products.
"This would seem to indicate that
Microsoft's strategy of offering Office Open XML to [international standards
body] Ecma, and then to ISO/IEC JTC1, may fail to achieve its objective, whether
or not the format is finally approved as a global standard," he said.
The likely reasons for that include
the software giant's heavy-handed actions during the ISO/IEC review period that ended unsuccessfully on Sept. 2, he
said.
Massachusetts
in 2005, he said, noting that "today that strategy just grew riskier."
But the two investigations do not focus on peripheral functionalities such as the media players, as others have done, but rather on the core of Microsoft's business: its operating and office suite software, Andy Updegrove, a partner with Boston law firm Gesmer Updegrove LLP, said in his ConsortiumInfo.org standards blog.
