After Opera’s complaint and after the European Committee for Interoperable Systems announced Microsoft did not disclose enough interoperability information for a range of its products, the European Commission has opened a new antitrust probe against Microsoft into whether the software giant unfairly tied its Web browser to Windows and made it harder for rival software to work with Windows. Yes, you read that right, IE being bundled with Windows is being questioned. The Commission noted that there is no proof of infringement but that the complaints make it necessary to investigate Microsoft's actions. The EU said it will also look at possible anticompetitive steps taken with products such as Microsoft's Office Open XML, Office word processing and spreadsheet programs, and the .NET framework.
Everyone thought the EU-Microsoft fiasco was all over; Microsoft had lost hundreds of millions and the EU had received useless new versions of XP. And yet, here we go again.
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