BusinessWeek has a very catchy summary (abbreviated above) that sheds light on the reasons for Microsoft to misbehave and even resort to fraudulent activity.

On top of fines and new inquiries, Microsoft is in danger of EU governments effectively banning its software to create documents

[...]

Compatibility Advantage

The new European investigations come as Microsoft finds itself in danger of seeing EU governments effectively ban its software to create documents. The European Commission and its member states have been mulling a mandate that all government documents be created in the Open Document Format (ODF), an open source competitor to the proprietary format used in Microsoft Word.

On top of the company's existing fears and failures to evolve, the one greatest cash cow comes under attack. Remember that this attack comes from openness, from standards, from fair competition, rather than from a single company or a single product. Real competition which is based on open protocols can be daunting to Microsoft, as the following Halloween Memo reminds us:

Microsoft's answer to what the memo meant when it said that Microsoft could extend standard protocols so as to deny Linux "entry into the market":

Q: The first document talked about extending standard protocols as a way to "deny OSS projects entry into the market." What does this mean?

A: To better serve customers, Microsoft needs to innovate above standard protocols. By innovating above the base protocol, we are able to deliver advanced functionality to users. An example of this is adding transactional support for DTC over HTTP. This would be a value-add and would in no way break the standard or undermine the concept of standards, of which Microsoft is a significant supporter. Yet it would allow us to solve a class of problems in value chain integration for our Web-based customers that are not solved by any public standard today. Microsoft recognizes that customers are not served by implementations that are different without adding value; we therefore support standards as the foundation on which further innovation can be based.

It figures. ⬆