14 DAY TRIAL // The Redmond Company has received a new deadline from the European Union Antitrust Commission. According to Neelie Kroes ,the European Commissioner for Competition, Microsoft has until Thanksgiving Day in the United States to hand over complete and accurate interface documentation in relegation to its Windows operating system.
"The Commission expects the remaining omissions and deficiencies in the technical documentation to be remedied by Nov. 23 so that by the end of November the entire set of technical documentation will be available for potential licensees to review," the Commission stated.
If the US software giant will fail to supply all the relevant Windows documentation by November 23, the EU Commission will take additional legal action against Microsoft. In July of this year, the European Commission has fined Microsoft 280.5 million Euros or $357 million for failing to comply with a previous anti-trust decision from 2004. At that time, Microsoft had only one more protocol documentation installment scheduled to be submitted.
While the Redmond Company then appealed the antitrust decision at the beginning of October with the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg, Neelie Kroes goes once again after the Redmond Company. The reason? The same Windows interoperability issue as in July.
"I don't have eternal life," commented Kroes. "I am not impressed if someone says 90 percent of the information is already there when we need 100 percent. It's a jigsaw and some parts are missing...In my opinion, this information should have been here a couple of months ago."
"The Commission has not received the complete documentation regarding all relevant protocols that is required to comply with its March 2004 Decision," the Commission added on Wednesday. "The Commission will decide in due course whether or not the technical documentation is in full compliance with the requirements of the March 2004 Decision taking into account comments from the potential licensees and advice from the Trustee on whether the technical documentation is operational."