Microsoft News Tracker

European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, fresh off her antitrust victory over Microsoft in the European Court of First Instance, has launched two new investigations into anticompetitive behavior by Microsoft:

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Opera, the Norwegian browser company, has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission claiming that Microsoft is abusing is dominant position in the PC operating systems market by “offering only Internet Explorer as a standard part of Windows, and hindering interoperability by not following accepted standards with IE.”

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David Lawsky and Sabina Zawadzki at Reuters:

A coalition of rivals charged on Friday that Microsoft Corp.’s new Vista operating system coming out next week will perpetuate practices found illegal in the European Union nearly three years ago.

The group, which includes IBM, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Oracle and Red Hat, said its complaints made last year are yet to be addressed just days before Vista is due for release.
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“Microsoft has clearly chosen to ignore the fundamental principles of the Commission’s March 2004 decision,” said Simon Awde, chairman of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS).

Microsoft said it had no comment. The Commission was not ready to act.

“We are in the process of examining this complaint,” a Commission spokesman said. ECIS disclosed on Friday that the latest additions to its complaint were made only last month, after it studied Vista.
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Other complainants in the group include Corel, RealNetworks , Linspire and Opera.

The ECIS press release is here and technologies specifically called out are XAML and Open XML. The European Commission always seems to move at a snail’s place, but they do move eventually so their reaction to Vista continues to be something to watch.

Despite all the rumors, Opera Software, the maker of a well regarded web browser with a miniscule market share, is apparently still available. Last week the buzz was that Google was buying Opera and it was denied. Today, the rumor is that Microsoft is buying Opera, but that’s been denied too:

“Our phones have been ringing off the hook,” said a spokesman for Opera. “But it’s not true. We have not been bought, and we have not received any offers. It’s just a rumour, like the Google rumour last week.”

There’s still time left to get that special gift!

On a more serious note, this week Opera released a worldwide beta of their “mini browser” for mobile phones:

Browser maker Opera Software released a final preview of its latest mobile application, dubbed Mini, which promises to deliver improved Web viewing to wireless handsets.
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The application claims to deliver a more desktop-like Web experience to any handset capable of running Java-based mobile applications, which includes many popular phones already in the hands of consumers.
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Along with the final version of Opera Mini, which Sivertsen said could include unspecified alterations, the company also plans to launch a new marketing campaign around the product, which will include a revamped Web site for downloads and device compatibility specifications.

Offered free of charge, Mini was designed as a simplified version of the firm’s other wireless offering, Opera Mobile Browser, which is designed to run on so-called smart phones, or more sophisticated wireless devices that offer the memory to store and run such applications.
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Company officials maintain that the browser could run on hundreds of millions of existing phones that use WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) to access the Web, giving it a huge potential audience worldwide versus the smaller numbers of customers in the relatively new smart phone sector.

The hard part for Opera seems to be how to monetize Opera Mini as the rest of the article describes. Find out more at the Opera Mini home page or download it here.