Next week’s European antitrust ruling against Microsoft Corp is a legacy of its past behaviour, but competitors say the company’s current strategy is a sign of history repeating itself.

Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, faces a decision on Monday from Europe’s Court of First Instance on whether the European Commission was justified in ruling the desktop computer software leader abused its near monopoly to push out rivals.

The ruling is the latest in a decade of antitrust cases against the company and it comes two months before the November expiration of most elements of the consent decree that settled a landmark US antitrust case five years ago. That decree, under which Microsoft has been operating since, covers the company’s ties to computer makers, how its software works in various categories of software and enforcement to ensure it does not repeat past practices.

Antitrust rulings
A new stable of competitors, who see ways to use the Internet to break Microsoft’s grip on desktop computing, say the penalties from the antitrust rulings were ineffective and have not changed the company’s tactics. “If it could, Microsoft would like to stop innovation,” Salesforce.com Chief Executive Marc Benioff said. This is an age-old criticism lobbed against Microsoft. A decade ago, it was rivals like Netscape, and Sun Microsystems,  who clashed with Microsoft.

Those companies have given way to new competitors like Web search leader Google Inc., Adobe Systems, a maker of graphic and Web design software, and Salesforce.com who are looking to circumvent Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop by delivering software as “services” over the Web. Over the past year, Google, now Microsoft’s biggest rival, has contested the software maker’s move to embed its own method of searching for documents inside the latest version of Windows, known as Vista.