EU Warns Microsoft Over Vista

Microsoft cannot sell Windows Vista in Europe, says European commissary of Antitrust, Kroes, if it includes all kinds of other products by Microsoft. This warning was send to Microsoft CEO Ballmer by the European committee last week. According to this article.

The European commission has been struggling with Microsoft for years. According to Kroes's spokesman this warning does not concern an official inquiry. "We assume Microsoft will cooperate to overcome our objections, since it is in the company’s best interest to understand it is not wise to face another Anti trust ruling."

The commission is afraid that with the development of Vista there also will be too little information available for competitors, resulting in an attack on the free European market for operating systems or software that runs on Windows.

Microsoft is selling software products like Media Player along with its OS. That way it sidelines competitors that also deliver media player software. The commission has outlawed the Media Player construction. The European court in Luxembourg has yet to rule on that matter though.

Kroes has warned Microsoft not to engage in the linked sale of operating systems and other software as well. It is not unlikely that Microsoft is planning to do so. Microsoft has designed its search engine to rival Google. Anti virus vendors are afraid the next Windows will already contain virus scanning software. (Microsoft bought RAV some time ago). Also Microsoft is constantly claiming how well it would integrate RSS right into Vista. That could really harm blog reading software and aggregation websites.

The letter from Kroes is not the first set back for Microsoft in Vista development. Earlier the corporation announced it had to delay the introduction by several months because of large software rewrites.

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