Microsoft vs European Union: Anti Competitive Behaviour or Competitive Advantage?

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Microsoft vs. European Union: Anti competitive behaviour or competitive advantage? This essay will discuss the whether Microsoft has used anti-competitive methods in order to achieve competitive advantages over their competition. In addition, both the European perspective as well as that of Microsoft will be covered. In December 1998 there was a complaint from Sun Microsystems claiming that Microsoft breached the European Union antitrust rules by refusing to supply essential information on its server and by engaging in discriminatory licensing. Microsoft refused to supply its operating server with interoperability information which is essential in order to interoperate with Microsoft's dominant PC operating system. Microsoft has bundled its software products in such a way which only allows its own products to be fully interoperable. According to Europa (2000) Microsoft has a dominating market share of about 95% in the personal computer operating systems. Due to their near monopolistic position in the market, Microsoft has the obligation to create and enable servers that are interoperable with non-Microsoft products. Sun Microsystems claims that by February 2000 Microsoft applied a policy of discriminatory licensing with the intention of driving all serious competitors out of the server software market. Furthermore in 2000 the European Commission examined Microsoft's conduct in a broader manner concerning the Windows Media Player product. Microsoft harmed the competition by tying the Windows PC operating system to its separate Windows Media player. Available data suggests that there is a clear trend favouring the Windows Media Player and technology which has lead to a reduction of other film, music and media software companies. Due to these illegal conducts, Microsoft had obtained a dominant position in the market whilst eliminating competition. In addition,

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