The
European Union's antitrust agency continues to investigate complaints about Microsoft Office 2007, Commissioner Neelie Kroes told participants of an antitrust law conference Thursday.
The EU's Competition Commission, which Kroes leads, has been looking
into possible antitrust violations of Office 2007 since it first
received complaints in February, commission spokesman Jonathan Todd
said Friday.
"This [investigation] isn't new," he said. He wouldn't elaborate on
the complaints. Neither did Kroes, who spoke Thursday at the Fordham
Annual Conference on International Antitrust Law and Policy, in New
York City.
In February, the European Committee on Interoperable Systems,
a lobbying group that includes some of Microsoft's biggest rivals --
Sun, Red Hat, IBM, Oracle, RealNetwork, and Adobe -- filed a complaint
with the EU against Microsoft. Although the committee didn't divulge
details about the complaint, it said then that the products it cited
included Office.
In June, Microsoft announced it was stripping some features from Office 2007, including a Save As PDF tool, under pressure from Adobe, which threatened the Redmond, Wash. developer with a lawsuit.
The EU and Microsoft are involved in a long-running antitrust battle
that has yet to work its way through the European courts. In 2004, the
slapped Microsoft with a record $613 million fine, which was followed
by another $357 million fine in July.
Starting last week, Microsoft and the EU have been engaged in a public relations firefight as the American developer threatened to delay Windows Vista
from reaching the European market unless Kroes' commission spelled out
any objections to the operating system's feature set. In return, the EU
said it was Microsoft's responsibility to follow the 2004 ruling as it
developed Vista.
Most recently, the argument between the two has revolved around
security tools Microsoft plans to integrate with Vista, including the
Windows Defender anti-phishing application.
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