ASHINGTON, May 6 (Bloomberg News) — The Microsoft Corporation bundled more multimedia features into Windows XP even after a judge ruled the company had illegally integrated extra functions into the operating system to protect its monopoly, a company executive testified today.
Nine states challenging Microsoft's proposed settlement of the federal government's four-year-old antitrust case suggested that Microsoft had not dropped efforts to squash competition and would not be restrained by the accord.
A lawyer for the states, John E. Schmidtlein, asked Will Poole, a Microsoft vice president, whether Microsoft "has altered the way it designed the Windows Media Player" after the original trial judge found that bundling new features into Windows violated antitrust laws.
"I am not aware of any special design alteration that was made as a result of the findings of the court," Mr. Poole replied. The newest version of Windows Media Player relies "on new features available only on Windows XP," he said.
The bundling issue has been central to the case since the government sued Microsoft in 1998. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of Federal District Court found that the company illegally integrated Web-browsing software into the Windows operating system to thwart a rival product, Netscape Navigator. He ordered Microsoft broken into two companies.
The appeals court, which overturned the breakup and ordered new hearings on other remedies, upheld findings that Microsoft's "commingling" of browser and operating system code illegally thwarted competition. The case was reassigned to Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who is presiding at hearings on the states' proposals in Federal District Court, now in their eighth week. She is also reviewing the Justice Department's settlement, which was endorsed by nine other states.
Mr. Poole testified last week that Microsoft decided in 1999, during the antitrust trial, to bundle additional multimedia features into the operating system to thwart a challenge from RealPlayer, a product of RealNetworks.
Mr. Poole testified today that Windows Media Player was more tightly bound into the operating system now than ever before. Unlike other versions, the Media Player edition in Windows XP is not sold separately because some of its functions do not work on older versions of Windows, Mr. Poole said.
The states say that Microsoft designs such dependencies purposely to make it difficult to comply with court orders to unbundle functions from Windows. The settlement would require Microsoft to let computer makers hide access to programs like Internet Explorer, but without removing the underlying code.
Windows XP, the newest version of the operating system that runs about 95 percent of the world's personal computers, was released in October, five months after the appeals court ordered new hearings.
The states challenging the settlement are California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Utah and West Virginia. The District of Columbia is also supporting tougher sanctions.
