A British watchdog agency said Tuesday it had complained to European Union regulators that Microsoft Corp.’s new file format for storing documents discouraged competition.
Britain’s agency for education and information technology said it wanted to feed information into an investigation the EU launched in January. That investigation is looking at whether the software giant deliberately withheld information from rivals that the rivals wanted so they could make their products compatible with Microsoft software.
This comes on the heels of EU antitrust action against Microsoft Corp. that has already resulted in US$2.63 billion (EU1.7 billion) in fines.
The watchdog, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, said it had told the European Commission that barriers to interoperability — which would allow different software products work smoothly with each other — hurt students and teachers.
“Impediments to interoperability limit choice,” the agency said. “In the context of the education system, this can result in higher prices and a range of other unsatisfactory effects.”
In an e-mailed statement, Microsoft spokeswoman Anne-Sophie de Brancion said the corporation would cooperate with both the British watchdog agency and the European Commission.
“Microsoft is deeply committed to education and interoperability,” the statement said. “We believe that more and more schools are upgrading to Windows Vista and Office 2007 as they increasingly recognize the benefits of embracing technology to transform teaching and learning. We have funded the development of tools to promote interoperability between Office 2007 and products based on the ODF (OpenDocument Format) file format.”
The watchdog agency was passing on to the European Commission — the EU executive — a complaint it initially filed in October with Britain’s Office of Fair Trading. That complaint objected to “the existence of impediments to effective interoperability in relation to Microsoft’s 2007 product.”
This referred Microsoft’s new file format, Office Open XML, which stores Word, Excel and PowerPoint…