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Microsoft Criticized By Antitrust Judge, Even Though Status Report Shows Progress

Colleen: "If there's an issue of resources, then put them in"

Microsoft Corporation is falling behind schedule in the landmark antitrust settlement, according to a federal judge.

US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the project, aimed at helping Microsoft rivals with accurate documentation, "needs to get done".

The settlement ordered in November 2002 enforced Microsoft, among other points, to develop and maintain accurate documentation to software companies that license Windows technical data.

"If there's an issue of resources, then put them in," Kollar-Kotelly added.

The paragraph in the court order, said that Microsoft has 9 months starting November 2002 to "make available for use by third parties, for the sole purpose of interoperating or communicating with a Windows Operating System Product" any information that is implemented on a Windows Operating System and used to communicate natively (not installed with a third party software) with a Microsoft product.

A week ago, a status report on Microsoft's progress said that out of 550 issues submitted to the company - out of which about 440 are medium priority, the rest being split among high and low priority - about 350 are still unresolved.

The report says the schedule for the Project's completion is July 2006, was originally due in January 2006.

Another project, a Protocol Analyzer codenamed "Troika" calls on Microsoft to create a series of Network Monitor protocol parsers in order to compare the information in the documentation against actual client-server network traffic.

According to the report, Microsoft committed to complete the project, as described by the Technical Committee (TC) within a year, by October 2006.

"Troika was intended to complement the TC's prototype implementation project to assure the overall completeness and accuracy of the technical documentation, as well as to provide licensees with useful tools as the parsers were developed and released to licensees throughout the course of the year."

Other issues are being solved or in beta, such as changing icons and shortcuts for programs like Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player to generic ones, and allow the users to easily switch between the Microsoft products and other third party software.

Overall, the status report showed that "Microsoft continues to make full compliance with its obligations under the Final Judgments an important priority throughout the company" and even though issues inevitably will arise, Microsoft has tried its best to respond and solve these issues.