IBM yesterday became the latest big US technology group to come under attack from Europe's top antitrust watchdog with officials at the European Commission launching a formal probe into its behaviour in the multibillion-dollar market for mainframe computers.
The Commission – which has fought long battles with Microsoft and Intel and is also taking a preliminary look at issues surrounding Google – said it was opening two separate cases against IBM.
The first focuses on allegations IBM has illegally tied its mainframe hardware to its mainframe operating system. This follows from complaints to Brussels from a couple of much smaller would-be rivals, which accused the US group of refusing to allow customers to run IBM's mainframe operating systems on anything other than IBM mainframe hardware.