International Legal Issues & Microsoft

The spate of legal issues and court battles in the United States that have plagued Microsoft in recent years, notwithstanding, the desire of the company to continue its expansion into the highly lucrative international marketplace is also not without its real and potential legal challenges. Per your request, a cursory review of the subject has been undertaken and summarized in the following pages.

Microsoft has grown substantially over the years into more than simply a provider of software applications for the personal computer (PC) marketplace. Today, the company, through its recent acquisition of Great Plains Software, is not providing enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions to small and mid-size business. Regardless, the company has, for a number of years, been considered a dominant player in the global information technology (IT) arena. Certainly, the changes witnessed in the closing years of the twentieth century, such as the development of the PC, satellites, the cellular telephone, and the Internet (Niermann, et al, 1999, p.1) have, in no small part, been brought about by the contributions made by Microsoft.

With the above technologies, the "IT" sector has grown (and will continue to grow) substantially, is changing quickly, is becoming more complex and pervasive, and is converging the integration of IT with consumer electronics and communications. Microsoft's contrib

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ntroller. Data carrier. On-line service provider. End-user displaying the information. All of the above. Given the pervasive presence of Microsoft and its products in one or more of the above categories, it is easy to see how the potential level of "liability" to Microsoft can be extreme. The contract process The way business is presently conducted on the Internet in the following three ways: (a) via email correspondence; (b) in closed network environs using electronic data interchange (EDI) protocols; and (c) over the Internet through Web sites. When the transaction occurs via Web site contracts can be negotiated and concluded in three (3) ways. First, there is the situation where the order is placed for a product through a Web site. The product is delivered to the customer and is in effect similar to a mail order or telephone purchase type of transaction. The associated payment and order acknowledgement process is still, for the most part, paper-oriented. Second, some products, especially software products, can be delivered digitally via a Web site and/or FTP (file transfer protocol) download site. Products falling into this category include software applications and updates (including those owned by Microsoft) as
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2994
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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