| Sumario: | This article discusses a conflict between the European Commission and computer company Microsoft. The headline-grabbing €497m ($612m) fine imposed by the European Commission on Microsoft this week is the least of the software giant's worries, for it makes that much profit every two weeks and is sitting on a cash pile nearly 100 times bigger. Far more worrying for Microsoft is the commission's demand that it produce, within 90 days, a version of its Windows operating system stripped of its media-playback capabilities. That sounds trivial, but it would set an important precedent that could be used to make Microsoft remove other bits from Windows in future. The next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, due in 2006, will include search, database and security add-ons, and will no doubt inspire new legal challenges. So great is Microsoft's desire to preserve its ability to bundle that, during settlement talks with the commission, it even offered to include rival media players in Windows, rather than remove its own.
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