Tech Firms Support Microsoft
Post | at | by Mike
Microsoft Corp. yesterday brought to life an ecosystem of technology companies that it claims would suffer if antitrust sanctions sought by state prosecutors are imposed. Testifying at Microsoft's request in a federal court hearing, four software company executives explained how their businesses are built around, and dependent on, the ubiquity of Microsoft products and services.
Microsoft wants to show U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly that not every company in the industry is a rival, and that she should not punish it for unlawful conduct under antitrust laws in ways that might damage other companies and their customers.
The executives said their products rely on applications that might be removed from a modular version, such as Internet Explorer. They said their testing and support costs would rise if they had to engineer their software to run with rival applications. Chris Hofstader, said his products rely exclusively on Internet Explorer and thus would not run on versions of Windows distributed without it.