Competition law considerations in the Microsoft case

Abstract

Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation with a global annual revenue of US$44.28 employing 71,553 in 102 countries as of July 2006. It develops, manufactures, licences and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices, most notably the Microsoft Windows operating system (henceforth "OS") and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software, each of which has achieved near-ubiquity in the desktop computer market. Founded in 1975, the company prospered in the personal computer (henceforth "pc") operating systems market with the advent of the IBM PC in the early eighties. IBM came up with a pc to stem the rise of Apple pcs, but it adopted a different commercial strategy. Unlike Apple which markets proprietary hardware and software to this very day, IBM, which hitherto had been the major force in mainframe computer systems outsourced a processor from Intel and an OS from Microsoft in the form of MS-DOS (Microsoft Disc OS). In 1985, Microsoft began shipping a software package called Windows which included a graphical user interface that enabled users to perform tasks by selecting icons and words on the screen using a mouse. Although originally just a user-interface, or "shell", sitting on top of MS-DOS, Windows took on more operating-system functionality over time.