Massachusetts: Microsoft's Behavior Toward Rivals Is TroublingMassachusetts: Microsoft's Behavior Toward Rivals Is Troubling

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Microsoft Corp. still engages in troubling business behavior despite constraints in the antitrust settlement it negotiated with the Bush administration, the Massachusetts attorney general told a U.S. judge Friday.

Authorities in Massachusetts, the only state still pursuing tougher court penalties against Microsoft, also disclosed they were investigating claims the software maker has planned an intensive campaign against unspecified rival Internet search engines and against Adobe Systems Inc.

Adobe's ubiquitous Acrobat software is among the most popular methods for exchanging electronic documents across the Internet and is regularly used by organizations, including the federal courts and Justice Department.

"If Microsoft is taking steps to hobble the competitive effectiveness of these rival products and thereby supplant them, such serial killing of competing technologies is a serious and troubling prospect," wrote Thomas F. Reilly, the attorney general in Massachusetts.

Microsoft and the Justice Department were expected to describe sometime later the company's efforts to abide by terms of the settlement. The company declined to comment immediately on Massachusetts' claims.

Reilly described unspecified reports as the source of these latest allegations against Microsoft; the attorney general's office has actively solicited complaints on its Web site about Microsoft's business conduct.

Massachusetts also criticized a key element of the antitrust settlement as ineffective. One of the most important provisions of the landmark settlement compels Microsoft to permit competitors to license parts of its technology to build products that seamlessly communicate with computers running Windows software.

Massachusetts said the program was feckless, arguing that the prices Microsoft charges rivals were too high and that the company provides only incomplete information to competitors.

The Justice Department and U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly acknowledged in October that the licensing program wasn't working as effectively as hoped. The judge urged the government to investigate why only nine companies so far have paid Microsoft to license its Windows technology for their own software products.