| Sumario: | Microsoft's legal battles, continued. Microsoft's antitrust battles in court and with regulators seem to have been dragging on forever. But they may now be entering their final stages. Though focused on narrow issues, how these battles play out will still have big implications for the firm and the software industry as a whole. This week, the European Commission held closed-door hearings on whether the giant American software firm abused its dominant position in personal-computer operating systems in two ways: by failing to provide smooth interoperability with server software from rival firms and by tying its Windows Media Player to its operating system, thus extending its dominance into an adjacent software market. On the latter, the solution agreed in the American case that is now being appealed is to allow PC makers and users to remove the icon for Microsoft applications, but not the underlying software. The European Commission could yet impose far tougher sanctions on Microsoft than America has done.
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