EU Parliament Member Wants to Ban Microsoft Bids

By Stuart J. Johnston

Despite Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) successful campaign to achieve standards recognition for its Office Open XML (OOXML) file formats by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), opponents and critics of both OOXML and Microsoft show no signs of letting up in their attacks on the company.

Indeed, Microsoft’s previous legal troubles with the European Commission (EC), which it has actively striven to remedy over the past six months, may come back and bite the company yet again – this time in the form of a potential five-year ban on selling its products to European Union (EU) governments.

This week, Heidi Rühle, a member of Germany’s Green Party who serves in the European Union’s (EU) Parliament — the EU’s legislative branch — filed a “question” with the EC in that regard. By doing so, she is officially asking the EC to determine whether the EU’s Court of First Instance’s (CFI) finding in September that Microsoft had, in fact, abused its monopoly power should cause a legally prescribed procurement ban to kick in.

If that should occur, Microsoft could be effectively frozen out of billions of Euros of government business for a maximum of up to five years based on its previous behavior, according to an article by German technology publisher Heise Online News.