We all would have thought Microsoft had it bad enough what with having to pay a $731 million fine over a browser error; but the company is being sued by a shareholder now. Kim Barovic has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Seattle, Washington, and it alleges that the top management failed to deal with the issue properly.
In 2013, the European Commission which is the European Union’s antitrust authority fined Microsoft $731 million for monopolizing the browser market in the region. The charge was that the company did not clearly provide Windows users with the information needed in order to access the web with the browser of their choice.
Microsoft had signed an agreement in 2009 which said that it would offer Windows users a ballot screen providing a list of alternatives to IE. But in the Service Pack 1 update for Windows 7 software deployed between February 2011 and July 2012, the ballot option did not appear owing to what the company called a technical error.
The Barovic lawsuit notes that Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer did not manage the situation adequately.