Microsoft today said it had filed an appeal in a landmark antitrust battle after the EU fined the software giant a record €497.2m (£332.2m) and ordered it to change its business practices.
The appeal said the ruling would undermine innovation and growth and asked the European Court of First Instance to annul the European commission's decision in March.
"On Monday, June 7, we filed our appeal against the European commission's decision with the EU's Court of First Instance, based in Luxembourg," Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's associate general counsel, said in a statement.
In March, the commission, the EU's executive arm, ruled that Microsoft had illegally "bundled" its Windows Media Player audiovisual software with its Windows operating system and used its monopoly in personal computers to illegally muscle its way into the market for software for more powerful computers called servers.
The commission said in its 302-page ruling that Microsoft's tying of Windows Media Player to the operating system "interferes with the normal competitive process which would benefit users in terms of quicker cycles of innovation due to unfettered competition on the merits".
The commission gave the software giant 90 days to separate Windows Media Player, which plays music and video over the internet, from its operating system, which has more than 90% of the PC market.
It would be up to computer makers to decide whether to ship Windows with the Windows Media Player or with a rival product, such as RealNetworks' Real Player. The commission also gave Microsoft 120 days to licence interconnection software to ease the way for rivals to hook up their servers to Windows as easily as Microsoft does.
The commission said Microsoft once provided the information to makers of network software - used to print documents in offices and to share files - but pulled back when Microsoft began making its own competing products.
Meanwhile, Germany's SAP, the world's biggest maker of business software, today said it was not for sale, a day after it confirmed it had held merger talks with Microsoft.
"I can clearly state that SAP is not for sale," a spokesman said. "We have a very comfortable strategy, we are very pleased with our position in the market. What should we worry about?"
Microsoft and SAP yesterday disclosed they had held discussions about a potential merger but scrapped them because of the complexity of any deal and the subsequent integration of the companies. The firms went public with the discussions because they expected the information to come out in the course of a US justice department lawsuit to block a hostile takeover by Oracle, the data base software company, of rival PeopleSoft.
