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Microsoft Counters Justice Breakup Proposal
Microsoft offers to resolve demands made on OEMs for installing Windows on systems, to provide Windows code to more than developers, and asks court for more preparation time for counterarguments.
Microsoft Corp. presented its counterproposal to a federal district court after the U.S. Department of Justice and 17 states asked the federal judge, who found that Microsoft stifled competition by abusing an operating system monopoly, to split Microsoft in two.
The Microsoft proposal calls for a series of limits on the business practices that Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson found illegally limited competition in the browser and middleware markets. Microsoft also requests more time from the court to prepare counterarguments if the court takes the government's breakup proposal seriously.
"We believe there is no basis in this case for the government's unprecedented breakup proposal," said Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates, "and we are hopeful that the Court will dismiss this excessive demand immediately so that the case can move forward much more rapidly."
To read Web Editor Isaac Slepner's report at ENT Magazine, go to http://www.entmag.com/breaknews.asp?ID=2618.