Microsoft gets a breather from European Union

Microsoft gets a breather from European Union

This news would come as a disappointment to a lot of people. Today, the deadline given to the software giant Microsoft by the European Union ended. The union was to decide upon the punishment to be given to the company if they had failed to comply with the ruling. And the company indeed had done little to satisfy the complainants.

The fine was expected to be around 5 million dollars per day until the time the company complied with the ruling. However, the latest news in is that the European Union has decided to delay the proceeding and has given the company two more months to comply with their ruling. This means, that the fines would be decided at the end of July unless Microsoft indeed takes some serious steps to please the courts.

Ruling required the company to take steps to allow fair competition in the market. Microsoft has a literal monopoly in the Operating System market and they have integrated applications like Media Players and Internet Browser into the OS forcing companies to suffer and even go out of business. The courts had instructed the software company to launch the Windows Operating System without Windows Media Player integrated and also release the software source code to the software developers to let them develop better applications.

In other news, the company has decided that it will not be releasing the next version of their web browser Internet Explorer for the Windows 2000 Operating System. Windows XP with Service Pack 2 would be required to get that much-awaited Internet Explorer 7 due to release sometime this year.