[Solar-general] respuesta de microsoft a caso en la UE

Jue Mar 25 03:18:08 CET 2004

  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