European antitrust regulators' decision Wednesday to hit Google Inc. with formal charges of breaking competition rules could lead to years of litigation, obligations for Google to change its business practices, and billions of euros in fines.
But an examination of the bloc's last big case against an allegedly dominant consumer tech firm—Microsoft Corp. —shows that the process may also have a lasting effect on a less tangible target: the company's culture.
Nearly two decades of antitrust litigation left a deep impact on Microsoft, say people close to the company. From hiring legions of lawyers to adopting a stringent process to green-light and build new products, legal compliance—and some would say conservatism—has become baked into the Redmond, Wash. company's DNA.
"Microsoft now has a very serious, not only antitrust, but just general compliance mentality," said Thomas Vinje, an antitrust lawyer who fought against Microsoft during the case, and now works for a Microsoft-backed group that has been challenging Google. "The company is changed in that regard."
Some people inside and outside Microsoft say that the change is for the better, a sign that a company has become more mature and accepts its legal obligations. Indeed, European officials rarely complain about Microsoft, whereas Google and Facebook are often in regulators' sights.
Others argue that the change made Microsoft less competitive. The decision to put lawyers into the decision-making process on what products to ship not only slowed things down but also made it difficult to launch integrated products that users might find useful, a former employee said.
While the details of the Google and Microsoft cases are different—one is about media players and servers, while the other is about a search engine and online ads—they remain anchored in some of the same underlying complaints. In both cases, detractors allege the firms abused a dominant position to leverage their own services over those of competitors.
News Corp, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, on Tuesday joined a group of companies that have formally filed a complaint with the commission regarding Google's competition practices, a News Corp spokesman said. He declined to disclose further details.
Google executives have tried to learn from Microsoft's experience, according to people familiar with the matter. The company worked for nearly five years to hammer out a settlement before the EU decided to charge it. Microsoft, by contrast, only got into negotiations about a settlement after four years and two volleys of formal charges.
Google nevertheless has also started to see some of the same internal changes in response to regulatory issues as Microsoft. In around 2007, when antitrust issues began emerging in the U.S., lawyers got more involved in the product decisions before release to avoid antitrust complaints, according to people familiar with the situation.
For instance, the company nixed an effort to start showing search results from personal Gmail accounts when users were searching the web because lawyers worried about the potential antitrust impact of tying the smaller email business to the company's main search activity, one of the people said.
Today, "the amount of concern over [antitrust enforcement] is enormous," said a person close to Google.
"There are certain things you know you can't do that other companies can do," said Jean-François Bellis, a lawyer who represented Microsoft against the EU. "When you have the label 'dominant position,' you now have a regulatory constituency that you must appease whenever you have a new product."
To be sure, both Google and Microsoft continue to roll out new products and services. Microsoft has invested in a voice-controlled personal assistant called Cortana, and has also shown off a new HoloLens that allows users to interact with holographic images.
The Microsoft case began in 1998 when Sun Microsystems Inc. first filed its interoperability complaint against the company. The EU followed up with formal charges 18 months later, which led to tit-for tat responses and complaints as the bloc honed its complaint, later adding allegations that Microsoft unfairly bundled its media player with the Windows operating system.
In 2004, Microsoft thought it had sealed a settlement deal with then antitrust chief Mario Monti, with then Chief Executive Steve Ballmer arriving in Brussels to help drive the case home. Mr. Monti instead had Mr. Ballmer over for coffee and told him that the deal was off and that the commission would officially find Microsoft in violation of the law, according to people close to the company.
Feeling burned, Microsoft fought the decision in court, along with subsequent fines and late fees. But by 2007, nearly a decade after the inquiries first started, Microsoft lost an appeal of the 2004 decision. Rather than keep fighting in the courts, the company decided to try to make peace. It withdrew its appeal and even when fighting later fines decided to take a much lower profile, lawyers said.
"At one point, you just say pay and move on," said Georg Berrich, an outside lawyer who worked for Microsoft on the case. "It's very difficult for someone to always have the bad press. You just want to move on."
Microsoft was fined a total of €2.2 billion ($ 2.33 billion) in the EU between 2004 and 2013. In addition, the firm was forced to release a special version of Windows and deliver thousands of pages of internal specifications as part of the inquiry.
Some lawyers question whether the remedies the EU applied had much effect on Microsoft itself, as very few people purchased the version of windows. Moreover the marketplace has moved on, making requirements for Microsoft to offer competing Internet browsers less important, given the rise of Google's Chrome browser.
The cultural impact, however, may be long lasting.
"They still think they were unfairly targeted," said the lawyer Mr. Vinje. "But they still get the fact that as a dominant company they now see they have to comply with the law."
Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com, Alistair Barr at alistair.barr@wsj.com and Rolfe Winkler at rolfe.winkler@wsj.com
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