To Our Partners: The European Commission today announced a decision against Microsoft in its five-year investigation of the company. I am writing to provide you with more information on the process that has led to this point and how we see it going forward. First, it is important to emphasize that, as Commissioner Monti has noted, throughout this long investigation Microsoft has worked constructively with the Commission and has sought to address all of the concerns relating to the case. As this case moves forward, Microsoft will respect and fully comply with European law, we will continue our investment in developing great technologies, and we will continue to deliver our innovation to our partners and customers. We were indeed able to reach agreement on all of the issues in the current case. In doing so, Microsoft made far-reaching and very substantial concessions on both the interoperability and media playback technology sides of the case. We volunteered a set of obligations that would have been unprecedented in the technology industry or elsewhere. Our settlement offer, which applied worldwide on both sides of the case, would have resulted in over 1 billion competitor media players being distributed in the next 3 years. However, the Commission also required Microsoft to agree to a single formula that would define how all questions concerning future innovation and technology integration beyond the scope of the current case should be dealt with. As a company that has been at the leading edge of the last 20 years of technology innovation and development, we do not believe that it is possible or desirable to design a single rule that would apply to all innovation and technology integration questions that may arise in the future. Innovating to the benefit of partners and customers has been the driving vision of Microsoft—and the basis of its partner philosophy—since it started in 1975. Our understanding of the needs of European partners and customers goes back to the time when the company set up its first European operations 22 years ago in 1982. Many of the innovations over that time have focused on language support, usability and adding features that improve the user experience with their PC from the moment they take it out of the box. And we seek to do this at a fair price by taking all our new technologies to a mass market. In many ways these additional technologies are core to user experience and to the usefulness of the product for partners and customers. According to our research, fully 80 percent of our European customers believe that Windows Media Player should be included with Windows. Computers have changed the way we live and work in the past two decades and Microsoft is proud to have been part of that revolution. It is unfortunate that the European Commission chose to take this route, but we also recognize and thank the Commission for the professional and co-operative fashion in which they have approached this case. As we move forward through this process, we will remain focused on collaborating with our partners and supporting product innovation to benefit Microsoft customers. We will support European governments on the pressing issues that face us all: computer security, spam, education and IT skills training. And we will help increasing Europe's competitiveness in the technology field, creating an information society and making sure that the online environment in which that society will thrive is safe for everyone. We will keep you informed of developments as the process moves forward. Yours sincerely, Allison Watson Vice President, Worldwide Partner Sales and Marketing Group