|
EU regulators wary of Microsoft's shift
2008-02-22
Microsoft Corp. said Thursday it will share more information about its products and technology in an effort to make it work better with rivals' software and meet the demands of antitrust regulators in Europe. European Union regulators, however, expressed skepticism, saying the software maker did not address monopoly abuse in the past or allegations it seeks to undercut rivals by bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. Microsoft said it is expanding access outside software developers have to information about the way its programs work. The software maker said it will give away documentation and computer code needed to make outside applications work together with Office, Windows and others. In the past, Microsoft charged for this information. The company will still charge a fee to companies that sell software built using this information. But Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie described the fees as "low royalty rates." Microsoft said it posted 30,000 pages of documents online that level the playing field for non-Microsoft developers, and announced plans to add more. Bob Muglia, a senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools business, said in an interview that those documents spell out exactly how Microsoft programs work together -- allowing, for example, another company to build an e-mail system that works as well with Outlook as Microsoft's own Exchange Server. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive officer, said in a news conference that the move could boost rivals' ability to compete. But it also helps developers build products that keep users interested in Windows PCs -- an essential ingredient if the company is to survive the industrywide shift toward Web-based programs that don't require a particular operating system. Ballmer said the decision will have a relatively minimal impact on Microsoft's revenue. "One way I'm interpreting this announcement today is, there's now consensus that interoperability, operating in the clear, is really good for business at the highest levels of the company," said Forrester Research analyst John Rymer. Rymer said the changes will make it easier for Microsoft's corporate customers to incorporate programs from other software makers into their systems more easily. And companies who develop Windows software won't have to rely on partial information and detective work to make their products work. "That's a big change," he said. Microsoft has spent years putting together such documentation in response to a decade of pressure from antitrust regulators in the U.S. and Europe. Analysts see the voluntary move as a way to placate the EU, which upheld a $613 million fine against the company last year and has since opened two new investigations into Microsoft's business practices. EU regulators appeared unimpressed by Thursday's announcement. "The Commission would welcome any move toward genuine interoperability," regulators said in a statement. "Nonetheless, the Commission notes that today's announcement follows at least four similar statements by Microsoft in the past on the importance of interoperability." The EU's latest probe was triggered by a complaint from the European Committee for Interoperable Systems -- a group representing IBM Corp., Nokia Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., RealNetworks Inc. and Oracle Corp. "The world needs a permanent change in Microsoft's behavior, not just another announcement," the ECIS group said in a statement. ECIS said a real test for Microsoft will be a meeting of the International Standards Organization next week in which the software maker is expected to push its own Windows-dependent Office OOXML document format over an existing industry standard supported by IBM. Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, responded that the company never considered past efforts to make its software work well with outside programs as a perfect solution. "I fully believe that as people do test this proposition in the months to come, I think they're going to come away with a high regard for the steps that our engineers are taking," Smith said. The company announced it will also open up Office programs to new file formats, and let PC users change preferences for how documents are saved. Microsoft also said it will launch an online forum to engage with open source developers, and said it would not sue them for "noncommercial distribution" of products built on its protocols. "I don't think the company's suddenly about to get open-source religion," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst for the research group Directions on Microsoft. "This is an attempt to stave off further antitrust and unfair competition complaints in the EU, particularly related to Office." Open-source mainstays echoed the analyst's skepticism. Michael Cunningham, general counsel at Linux operating system distributor Red Hat Inc., wrote in a blog post that Microsoft's announcement "appears carefully crafted to foreclose competition from the open source community." "The only hope for reintroducing competition to the monopoly markets Microsoft now controls -- Windows, Office, etc. -- is through commercial distributions of competitive open source software products," Cunningham wrote. __ AP Business Writer Aoife White contributed to this report from Brussels.
| 
