According to the lawsuit, filed in a US District Court of Washington, storage management software, which Microsoft licensed from Veritas in 1996, was used to develop parts of a number of Windows products and has been used in the development of Windows Vista. In fact, the lawsuit alleges that Microsoft has fooled the US Government to grant the company patents, which were actually based on Veritas intellectual property. In its lawsuit, Symantec alleges that Microsoft has built parts of Vista on a "house of cards" of Symantec-invented technology.

The kicker, however, is that, aside from damages, Symantec is seeking an injunction against all further development of Vista and Longhorn Server, plus a recall of other products on the market which it claims were built using Symantec intellectual property.

Microsoft denies all the Symantec allegations and claims that it purchased the intellectual property rights from Veritas in 2004 to all of the technologies it has used in its products.

Regardless of the outcome of this case, this is one lawsuit that could really do some damage to Microsoft. Vista is a product which has been a long time coming and Microsoft has been pulling out all stops to get it ready for release in early 2007. It also incorporates many features that Microsoft is hoping will help it compete better against Google in search, as well as enhanced security, which for the first time implements a permissions based security regime, similar to Linux and Unix.

Delays and uncertainty concerning the release of Vista could throw a huge kink in Microsoft's overall strategy for the immediate future, which involves Office 2007 and Windows Live Search for the enterprise.

Symantec has been vocal recently about the touted enhanced security features of Vista, claiming that it is the expert in security rather than Microsoft. To an outside observer, it could appear that Symantec fears that much of its product base will become redundant for Vista users. {moscomment}