EU competition regulators are to launch two new competition investigations against Microsoft, opening fresh fronts in their battle against the US software giant's dominant market power.
The European Commission said one investigation would look at how a broad range of software, including Microsoft's popular Office package, cound operate with rival products.
The other inquiry would look into whether Microsoft had illegally tied products - including its Internet Explorer browser - to its Windows operating system, which has a near-monopoly.
One complaint was brought by Opera, a Norwegian maker of a Web browser which competes with Internet Explorer.
The second was brought by an industry group, the European Committee for Inter-operable Systems, which said Microsoft did not disclose enough inter-operability information for a range of products.
In September, Microsoft lost an appeal against a fine of nearly €500m which EU regulators slapped on the company in 2004 for abusing its dominant market power. That case related to the way Microsoft tied its media player to Windows.
