I haven't been following the EU anti-trust thing with Microsoft very closely, but it's been pretty hard to miss of late. Here's a CNet piece on it:

After years of investigation, the Commission found in 2004 that Microsoft used near-monopoly power from its Windows operating system to harm competitors making work group servers, which run printing and sign-on services in offices.

The Commission ordered Microsoft to give rivals the information needed so their work group servers could compete on a level playing field with Microsoft's own. The company must help its rivals interconnect smoothly with Windows.

I wonder if any of the commissioners have actually used Windows, Linux, and Macs on a network. I have all three here, and oddly enough, the Mac and Linux boxes (and this is an ancient Linux - Redhat 7!) do a better job with Windows networking than the XP boxes do. I have XP on my latop, and my wife has 2 XP boxes in the living room. The three boxes can only intermittently see shared drives and printers - I've never really understood why. The Mac - it always sees everything without a problem. Ditto the Linux box.

Given the way Windows networking *cough* works *cough*, maybe Microsoft's real problem is that they need to share the information with themselves.

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