Antitrust status conference on tap for Microsoft

Microsoft and antitrust regulators will be back in federal court on Thursday, for a regularly scheduled status conference on the software giant's compliance with the final judgment order stemming from its historic consent decree.

In preparation for the upcoming hearing, which will be held in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Microsoft, the Department of Justice, and state antitrust regulators filed a joint status report late last week.

The parties will again address improving the technical documents that Microsoft provides to third-party licensees, which are meant to aid them in making their software interoperable with the Redmond giant's operating system.

Antitrust regulators and the technical committee expressed concerns at the last joint status hearing back in June that Microsoft's overview documents were not sufficient. Microsoft, as a result, drafted additional "system" documents that aimed to provide more details on the interaction between the protocols in various complex scenarios. But after reviewing the templates, regulators and a court-appointed technical committee found they needed revisions.

Once the templates are finalized, Microsoft plans to publish all 19 system document drafts by the end of March, with the final version expected by the end of June.

Meanwhile, Microsoft recently informed the technical committee that the next version of Windows, Windows 7, will have a number of protocol changes and, as a result, will have a number of new and modified technical documents. The technical committee expects to see these documents later this year, according to the joint status report.

During the hearing, the parties may also touch on a complaint made prior to November last year, which the states and the DOJ are investigating. Microsoft declined to comment on the investigation.

[likexx]

The lawyers are the same as people on Wall Street. They did NOTHING but play tricks with companies who make the real contribution. The success of Windows/Office/IE is not because of monopoly, but because of the easy-to-use and feature-rich made by MSFT. People VOTE windows with their REAL money. For software market, where everyone upgrades two or three years, there is no monopoly existing because people just choose the best product. Unfortunately, this means the best product is usually the most popular one. In the low-IQ mind of lawyers, it becomes "monopoly". The lawyers simply don't understand and they will never ever understand the results of technology. The lawyers can only play around with the court, but contribute nothing!

[dhavleak]

@likexx

Agreed!

On top of that Antitrust law is absolute BS. Imagine this: at say 30% of market share X action is legal. At 75% of market share the same X action becomes illegal. At what point exactly did X become illegal? Even the antitrust lawyers won't be able to answer that.

MS was largely non-political and did not make contributions to campaings, lobbyists until they came under antitrust scrutiny. Basically the rest of the industry was spending mega bucks to get the DOJ to go after them. The same thing is going to happen to Google soon -- they're largely non-political right now, but more and more companies are urging the DOJ to go after them. When they do, another huge corporation will have learned it's lesson and will start paying "protection money" to the lobbyists and political campaigns.