Microsoft Bundles Skype, Outlook in Select Countries

While driving more value to its end customers and delivering a mix of both the worlds in Outlook and Skype, Microsoft has surely gone overboard in terms of making sure that its customers get more than what they actually sign for, experts close the development feel that this move might be challenged in anti-trust court in Europe.

In its bid to deliver more value to its customer set, Redmond, US based global software major Microsoft has integrated its two biggest communications services: Skype and Outlook.

As part of this offering, Microsoft has announced that Skype is now available for all Outlook customers in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Canada, and Brazil, enabling its users in these countries to use the video calling and messaging service directly from their e-mail.

Microsoft’s Tryst with Anti-Trust

It may be recalled that as an organization, Microsoft has a history of frustrating regulators by over-bundling its own services that compete with third party products or solutions into its own operating system.

In the year 1993, Novell claimed that Microsoft was blocking its competitors out of the market with the help of its anti-competitive practices. The complaint centered on the license practices at the time which required royalties from each computer sold by a supplier of Microsoft’s operating system, whether or not the unit actually contained the Windows operating system. Microsoft reached a settlement in 1994, ending some of its license practices.

Again, in 1998, Sun Microsystems raised a complaint about the lack of disclosure of some of the interfaces to Windows NT. The case widened when the European Union examined how streaming media technologies were integrated with Windows.