05/13/2008

By AOIFE WHITE  / Associated Press

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.

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency 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 that has already resulted in $2.63 billion (euro1.7 billion) in fines.

The British agency said it had told the European Commission that barriers to interoperability, which hamper different software products from working 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 company would cooperate with both the 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 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 files.

Critics of Office Open XML, or OOXML, claim it locks out competitors, giving Microsoft customers no choice but to keep buying Microsoft programs. Microsoft claims its format is a more useful and varied alternative to another open standard, OpenDocument Format or ODF, which is backed by Sun Microsystems, IBM and others.

Office Open XML was approved last month as an international standard, which paves the way for it to be picked up by governments and large corporations. The British watchdog agency was highly critical of that move, saying it created two incompatible standards for saving documents.

The British agency said that problems using Office 2007 software would be compounded by Microsoft's refusal to offer the same support to users of OpenDocument Format that it gives to Office Open XML.