Microsoft Amends Vista To Avoid Antitrust Headache

October 16th, 2006: Responding to antitrust concerns held by the European Commission and South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission, Microsoft announced on Friday that it has altered its upcoming Windows Vista operating system to avoid any anti-competition problems.

After staring down the barrel over security, online documents and its dominating browser, the company has made the changes to keep its release schedule intact and attempt to keep complaints at bay. It has fallen short of stripping out or fundamentally altering the offending features, however, instead appearing to do just enough to possibly keep the EC off its back.

When it released XP, Microsoft’s decision to include Windows Media Player as a core element drew fire from many sides. This time around, it was shaping up to face another round of antitrust allegations from the likes of Adobe due to the inclusion of native PDF support, and security companies such as Symantec over Vista’s extended security features.

To avoid any antitrust headaches, Microsoft has changed PDF support to its new Open XML format, and submitted this to independent standards bodies. It has allowed security vendors access to Vista’s core via a separate API, and instead of forcing Internet Explorer as the default search engine it has enabled users to select either IE, or their own browser as the system default.

The European Commission has repeated its initial statement saying that it is not up to regulators to approve Vista for release, bur rather that “Microsoft must shoulder its own responsibilities to ensure that Vista is fully compliant with competition rules and in particular with the principles laid down in the March 2004 commission antitrust decision concerning Microsoft.”

Microsoft says that it is confident that these changes are enough to defuse any antitrust actions, however, ahead of any decision the European Commission says it will be monitoring Vista’s performance in the marketplace very closely.

The company hopes that the alterations will enable it to proceed with a simultaneous world-wide launch of the much talked about OS.

“We are excited to bring the security enhancements and innovative new features of Windows Vista to our customers and partners around the world, and we are committed to adhering to local law in every region of the world,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a statement.

Comment on this story