BusinessWeekOnline has an interview with attorney Thomas Vinje, who represents Microsoft antagonists, in which Vinje notes:
In February, ECIS filed a new complaint that accuses Microsoft of trying to extend its dominance via planned new products, such as a new operating system for servers. What does that mean exactly?
What Microsoft is trying to do now is bundle digital rights management products into the operating system. We've seen this movie before. We've seen it with Netscape, with RealPlayer (which lost massive market share after Microsoft bundled similar products into Windows).
Microsoft has 70% of the overall server market, they are certainly dominant. Try selling digital rights management products when there is already a usable one in the operating system.
Timely point, perhaps. EMC has acquired Enterprise DRM company Authentica according to articles in the Boston Business Journal and in VentureWire. The VentureWire article indicates that EMC paid "less than twice the amount of venture capital it raised," according to an analyst's report.
In the US, that leaves Liquid Machines and SealedMedia in the enterprise DRM space. Liquid has apparently been moving closer to Microsoft by implementing their DRM product on Microsoft's RMS server foundation.
Sealed continues to go it alone, although it supports many popular file formats including Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat. In the past few months Sealed has closed an additional round of financing and has reported solid growth, according to press releases on the Sealed web site.
Sealed also has strong relationships with EMC's Documentum, a relationship that will be interesting to watch given the Authentica acquisition.
