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To: Essam Zaneldin who wrote (11469)	4/15/1998 11:33:00 PM
From: soup	Respond to of 213173

Brazil Opens Microsoft Probe via NY Times/Associated Press Filed at 5:42 p.m. EDT RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- >Brazil's Justice Ministry has opened an investigation into Microsoft's subsidiary here over alleged violations of antitrust laws. Microsoft is accused of unfairly packaging Microsoft Money, a financial management application, with a separate program known as Microsoft For Small Businesses, a Justice Ministry spokesman said Wednesday. The fresh probe adds to scrutiny of the Redmond, Wash.-based software maker. The U.S. Justice Department has charged Microsoft with abusing its dominance of operating system programs to control other software markets. Brazil's Justice Ministry opened its investigation after Paiva Piovesan, an obscure Brazilian software company, filed a formal complaint that Microsoft's Money was unfairly competing with its own money management program, Finance For Windows. Rodrigo Paiva, president of Paiva Piovesan, said his company filed the complaint because he believed Microsoft's marketing strategy was unfairly hurting his business. ''We are a small company and we have a good product. I want to compete,'' he said in a telephone conversation from Belo Horizonte, where his company is based. In some cases, Microsoft has given Money away to banks operating in Brazil for about one year, he said. Paiva said he was concerned that Microsoft will start packaging Money with its Office, a package of business programs that reaches 95% of the Brazilian market. Paiva did not have an estimate of the amount of money that his company has lost because of Microsoft's marketing and packaging techniques, but said that about 250,000 copies of Money have been distributed over the last year in Brazil to clients which could have been his. A spokesman for Microsoft in Brazil was not immediately available for comment.< nytimes.com ----------------------- Under the heading of not wanting to miss the forest (big picture) for the trees (quarterly earnings), I posted the above. It's noteworthy how widespread the resistance to MSFT's monopolistic practices has become. As the lone alternative OS provider, this must factor into AAPL's future. soup