As Microsoft gears up for the full launch of
Windows Vista, a European open-systems
advocate has slammed the operating system as
“anti-competitive”.
The European Committee for Interoperable Systems
(Ecis) claims Vista follows the “very same practices [in Windows
XP] the European Commission found to be illegal almost three years
ago”.
Ecis claimed Vista will “stifle competition in the PC and server
markets, and extend its closed standards into the open standards
based internet environment”.
Simon Awde, ECIS chairman, said, "With Vista, Microsoft has
clearly chosen to ignore the fundamental principles of the
Commission‘s March 2004 decision.”
That decision found that Microsoft had abused its Windows PC
operating system monopoly by withholding the interface information
necessary for competing workgroup server systems to fully
interoperate with Windows, and by bundling in its own media
player.
"Vista is the first step in Microsoft’s strategy to extend its
market dominance to the internet," Awde claimed.
For example, said Awde, “Microsoft's XAML mark-up language,
positioned to replace HTML - the current industry standard for
publishing language on the internet - is designed from the ground
up to be dependent on Windows, and thus is not cross-platform by
nature.”
In addition, he said, Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 will also
introduce the Open XML file format, by which “Microsoft seeks to
displace ODF (Open Document Format), the existing ISO approved,
truly open document file format“.
Unlike the ISO ODF file format, which operates on multiple
vendor platforms, Microsoft's Open XML file format today only runs
seamlessly on the Microsoft Office platform.
Ecis has already complained to the European Commission about
Microsoft’s new OS, and is lobbying for a decision on the compliant
as quickly as possible.
While Ecis seeks to promote open standards in the European ICT
sector, some of its leading members are among Microsoft‘s fiercest
rivals, including Adobe, Corel, IBM, Nokia, Oracle, RealNetworks,
Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems.
Microsoft has not responded to Ecis’s criticism.
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