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Microsoft Would Settle For The Children
The news from MSNBC
is that Microsoft wants to, er, settle for the children. Take that
whichever way you want. They propose to settle civil anti-trust cases (not the DoJ suit) with a $1.1 billion (retail value) spanking (they
have $36 billion in the bank), consisting of free computer goodies to our nation's poorest schools (the first hit's free, kids). I'm sure Microsoft will upgrade those old computers to keep them current, in perpetuity, for free, out of the kindness of their hearts, but in an apparent oversight that was left out of the news report. Of that $1.1 billion, $0.9 billion will be software presumably valued at whatever Microsoft wants to charge (see "monopoly"). For hardware and (laughable) training/support costs, Microsoft will be docked three weeks' worth of interest on their cashpile; they will seek matching funds for the remainder, I am not making this up. Some lawyers opposed this but "concluded that Microsoft's monopoly already is so pervasive that students would have to learn to use these products anyway in the workplace." Update: 11/20 21:22 GMT by M : Heh. Red Hat offers an alternative to Microsoft's settlement proposal - you provide hardware, we'll provide software.
"You are a monopoly. As punishment, you must provide free software to the public schools, so that you can spread even further. Bad Microsoft! Now get back to replacing those foreign operating systems."
You're very right, Jamie. The double-meaning in the title *is* hilarious.
<obvious>Why not hook the kids up to CocaCola and BigMac's, IV'd.</obvious>
.. don't let your kids get left behind by forcing them to think "My Documents" is where their files are, no matter which computer/OS/etc they are on.
/surely/ be stuck in places when they grow up when only Coke is available).
This is kind of backwards if you want your next generation to be tech-saavy. Windows ABSTRACTS computers, removing the need (for most people) to actually know how a computer (and software) operates. In this respect, the world will be FORCED to at least have a small understanding of the technology
At any rate, it's insane. Would we let Coke donate lots of Coke to kids as a settlement (knowing that they'll
What strikes me the most is the acceptance that Windows will be the dominant platform for the next 80 years. Fortunately, this will not be true. Very few companies even stay in business that long.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Either hell has frozen over or I missed something. Microsoft has not triumphed over the government, as MSNBC claims. AFAIK, the 18 states involved are still in discussion about the goverment settlement. Just like MS, portrarying themselves as the victim. "We won the case against the government, now we just have to work out these little suits. The big, cuddly teddy bear you as Microsoft will not give in... we will fight to stay strong". Yeah, bite me. Microsoft is not good for the consumer, yet they're parading themselves around like the consumer is on THEIR side.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I imagine MS is looking to do the same thing here. It will be a good thing for MS, a good thing for the schools, what the hell right? Wrong. I am really disapointed that they would try and do this a means to reach settlement, makes the whole thing rather hollow. If they had done this just because they felt like it I'd probably support them in it, now they just look slimy.
Errr, more slimy.
Are they kidding? This doesn't solve anything; it makes it worse! By providing software _for free_ to such a large number of people, the software now becomes the defacto standard for yet another group of people. These students will grow up in Microsoft(TM) America and like so many people before them be hooked into software that they'll be reluctant to leave in the future.
And using poorer schools... that's good. These schools would have previously been a good "target market" for OSS... can't beat the price. Now MS gets three victories for the price of none... they get the plaintiffs off of their backs, they get the PR boost that always comes with helping poor children, and they get a win against OSS. And what does it cost them? A "virtual" $1.1 billion. They're giving software to people that probably wouldn't have bought it in the first place, and they're giving away a product based on its RETAIL value; it costs MS very little to give this software away. The realized cost to MS will probably be less than $100 million. Much less.
Another Seattlement, if you ask me. I think I'm going to give up and be a rice farmer now... until Microsoft (TM) Wheat pushes me out of the staple foods market.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Maybe I'm being cynical, but Microsoft providing the software for these institutions for free would be a very good move on their part to slow down the adoption of alternative operating systems and office suites. It's here, in schools that cannot afford the MS pricing anymore, that the erosion of MS monopoly will begin, and Microsoft has proposed a very effective counter measure to it. They slow down Linux and OSS adoption, and get DOJ off their backs. Both with one strike.
Then again, maybe they're just doing it for the goodness of their hearts...
In other words, this (i) helps Microsoft strengthen their Monopoly, (ii) costs Microsoft little more than $200 million, and (iii) probably harms children.
The only way any kind of settlement with Microsoft will accomplish anything is if the people who make up Microsoft's leadership actually alter their behavior.
This latest proposal shows that Microsoft is fundamentally incapable of changing its core DNA to suit a new paradigm. While all public businesses are driven by valuation, Microsoft doesn't realize that when a corporation reaches a certain size and power in the marketplace, it carries additional responsibilities.
Microsoft prides itself on providing boundless upward value to stockholders, but it seems to have a huge mental block when it comes to assessing its role in the larger culture.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
So our average computer shopper doesn't research that end of it. Should they... of course. But, if they don't understand that they should be researching HW/SW/OS, then they won't. I imagine some investigate SW to some degree (Antivirus, maybe an office suite), but I highly doubt any would even think of the OS.
So who is going to educate (en masse) the public. We certainly can't expect MS to do it. Who would expect any business to educate its customers into researching alternatives? Us, the Free SW crowd? Sure, we would, but how? That's the real question. How do we show the general public that there are other options out there. That they don't have to just accept whatever the big retailer installs on their machine.
According to this idea....
-MS gets to increase it's market share(by displacing Macs in schools)
-Does not need to change it's monopolistic practices
-Gets a $1.1 billion tax writeoff(They will try to write that off)
Wow, sounds like a great deal....for Microsoft and states idiotic enough to sign this(Kickbacks anyone?)
-Henry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
$1.1 billion worth of software does not cost Microsoft anything. It's essentially free for Microsoft to crank out more software since the R&D has already been paid for. That reduces this so-called "settlement" to just a Microsoft marketing campaign.
Best solution: they must contribute $billion or so of cold, hard, cash to a fund for school technology improvement. Then independent technical experts and educators can suggest uses for the money that don't necessarily benefit Microsoft. This settlement is a total victory for Microsoft - I'd hate to see what happens when they actually win a case...
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Bullshit. These kids need better computers in their classrooms the way staving Afghanis need shiny new Air Jordans.
These kids need school buildings that aren't falling down, schools that are free of violence, teachers who are competent and well-paid, and textbooks that are up to date. Computers in the classroom (other than in progamming and clerical classes, of course) is a fad that will ultimately have as much revolutionary impact as educational filmstrips. (Beep.)
This is a loss for everyone except Microsoft. In any sane nation, their corporate charter would have been revoked long ago, their corporate HQ razed and the ground salted, and Gates would have spent a week in the pillory, being pelted with rotten tomatoes and old DOS manuals.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Uh, the alternative is not a lump sum payment to any government. This is a settlement of the *private*, class-action, civil suits brought againts the company by users purporting to have been materially harmed by the monopoly. The alternative is a lump payment to any SOB who wants in on the class. Wired says about $10 bucks a head after attorneys' fees.
This is eerily like big tobacco settling their suits by providing free cartons for distribution in schools. Locking in another generation of lusers.
The size of the MS monopoly is starting to generate a gravity-like field which distorts perception of reality in its presence. Even ostensibly unbiased media coverage of MS seems boggled as to how to speak about them. I can't imagine any other entity in any other industry even suggesting such a thing. And now MS is dictating security policy on Capital Hill. Its like GM setting emmissions standards. Thankfully, the Fates look askance at such hubris.
And lately I do too. Until a few months ago I liked to imagine that I understood peoples fear of the unknown, their reliance on the familiar; I took a gentle, only slightly patronizing tone with Windows users. Now I regard them all as moral beggars. If you run Windows you are wrong, and should be shunned from polite society.
illegitimii non ingravare
Consumers benefit by getting something
As a consumer who has presumably been harmed, what exactly does this settlement do for me? How has MS been 'punished' for its actions, or alternatively how is it deterred from doing it again?
Have you not been reading the case? at least one of the points at issue is that M$ has been forcing hardware vewndors who sell its product to not carry competing products (ie. if you want to make a PC with Windows on it you can't sell PCs with Linux or Be, or etc on it).
The result - I couldn't buy a laptop with Linux, or even a blank one to put Linux on myself - now because of the DoJ suit things have changed (a little). That's called "leveraging a monopoly" it's illegal
So long as a customer goes to buy a PC at a brand leader like Dell, or Compaq, or Gateway and they don't have a choice of a non-M$ OS, or of one without an OS (at a lower price of course) then we don't have a choice.
PS: you want to buy all the old copies of Windows I was forced to buy with my last few computers? oh wait I'm not allowed to sell them - I was forced to pay for them, declined to accept the license but seemingly am still bound by conditions in the license I didn't accept that bar me from selling it
This agreement is such bullshit that it boggles the mind.
Microsoft gives away some of it's software to schools that could not have afforded it anyway (so they are really not losing potential revenues).
The real kicker of this settlement is that it sounds like Microsoft will get to value the software at its reatail value and not at the actual marginal cost to Microsoft
Microsoft loses almost no money from giving away the software, except the cost of distributing the cd's. So they get to write-off $1.1 billion in profits, value the give-away at $1.1 billion, but their actual costs are only pennies per installation. So if they value windows XP at $200 but the actual costs of distribution and media on that one istallation are (let's be generous) $5, you can see that this $1.1 billion settlement really costs them only $25 million dollars (taking the $200:$5 ratio of stated-value:actual-cost used earlier).
Now since this $1.1 billion dollars is subtracted from their income, and assuming Microsoft pays about 15% corporate taxes, we can see that they get a $165 million write-off for about $25 million dollars. In other words, Microsoft ends up $140 million dollars richer from this deal.
Now there is $128 million in training and support they are promising (again, real cost to Microsoft is probably less) but even that leaves them with a profit. There are vague promises of setting up a foundation with up to $250 million, but that is not a firm number.
Also they will be trying to obtain matching funds from other charities, to leverage this operation.
And when you get down to brass tacks, this deal benefits Microsoft in a very important way. This gives them an excuse to train millions of schoolkids on how to use their stupid software so that when these kids eventually look for jobs their employers will have to buy software from Microsoft because that is what their employees have been trained on.
Also Microsoft gets good P.R. for "helping disadvantaged kids" (ha!) and don't have to spend millions more staying in court and risking a truly costly jury award.
In summary, Microsoft gets to escape any future civil liability, while instituting a training program that makes their software more valuable at virtually no cost, or even a cash gain for themselves. And all the lawyers will get fat fees.
Sounds like a great deal for Microsoft. Now what would be really good is if Microsoft had to spend $1.1 billion dollars deploying other companies software in disadvantaged schools. Wouldn't it be great to know that the Linux or FreeBSD or Oracle, etc., etc., installation at your local school being paid for by Linux?
evanchik.net
Force Microsoft to donate $1.1 billion among the Free Software Foundation, the OpenOffice project, KDE and GNOME projects, the Linux kernel team, and various others. That'll pay all the significant Open Source developers out there for hmm.. at least the next 10 years.
Hmm, when I was in high school they made a big deal about beingup to date with the latest software used in industry. I remember clearly writing all my reports in WordPerfect 5.1 for Dos, just like industry. Didn't help me any though, by the time I got out of college MsWord was the standard (word95 I think). Not that it matters, the company I work for uses FrameMaker when we need formated text, and otherwise emacs, or vi depending on your religion.
I also remember watching the transisition from Word*Star, but I was a kid so that was on the sidelines.
With that history it seems to me that computers change too quick for it to matter what you learn on in high school, it will be obsolete before long anyway.
You're joking, right?
How about Outlook's Virus of the Week? How about IIS's Vulnerability of the Week? How about ten years of blue screens? How about twenty years of a crappy filesystem that corrupts itself at the first opportunity? (And don't give me any bullshit about FAT being robust. If it were robust, why is SystemAgent set by default to paper over its fragility?) How about a fundamentally b0rk3d system design that the merest child could tell you was a disaster from the start? How about twenty five years of lying to the public (you would call it "marketing" and "PR") about how "innovative" Microsoft is, when in fact they've been strip-mining the industry for other people's ideas, filing off the serial numbers, and presenting them as their own? Good gravy, not even Bill's BASIC was original, being a port from a BASIC interpreter at Harvard (such activity would be considered criminal today by Bill's own set of "ethics").
You're right, but only in a sense that a dissembling lawyer would agree with. It is difficult to measure the harm to consumers, but that does not mean it didn't happen or merit correction.
Except that Microsoft was found guilty of criminal anti-trust violations. They do not get to win. Not by a longshot.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I read the article, and youre right about the math adding part. If its 1.1 or 1.7 or somewhere in between thats not the important part. read very closely. they are giving away windows XP and, get this, refurbished laptops. not new laptops, refurbished ones. Estimated dollar value of each $5-600. I dont know about you, but i dont know a used laptop in that price range that will run windows XP. Your point about the development costs of XP is valid, but only to a point. MS needs to sell y units of XP to break even, every unit sold after then is just the cost of duping and packaging. Out of the $100-300 MS gets from an XP sale, maybe $1-2 goes to actually producing it. Im sure they recouped the full cost of development already. Plus its an even sweeter deal for MS if windows is preinstalled. They dont have to make duplicate copies, the box makers do that, and some of them even throw in their own manuals. So everything is profit. Im quite certain that they have already recouped their initial development costs and are just rolling in dough now. This is a win-win scenario for MS. They look good, they dont have to pay any money, and the prosecuters get to say: See, we punished the big bad monopoly. I was unaware that punishments could be win-win. Usually they are win-lose or lose-lose. It would be like making Osama Bin Ladens punishement to be comunity service as a flight school instructor.
NPR just had coverage of this on all things considered today. There they stated that it would cost Microsoft 1.1 billion. Here is my letter to them...
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 18:12:38 -0500
From: "Clark C . Evans"
To: atc@npr.org
Subject: Incorrect Statement about Microsoft Settlement
You mentioned the Microsoft settlement on your
program this afternoon. And I'm afraid I heared
two mis-representations:
1. This program will cost Microsoft 1.1 Billion.
FACT: This program will cost Microsoft $300 Million.
The CD-ROMs and paper that the licenses
for their "$800 million" of Microsoft
software won't cost Microsoft more than
a few thousand dollars.
Further, since these schools are too
poor to buy the software, you can't
argue that it is a loss in revenue.
FACT: Having Children learn to use Microsoft
software, instead of open soruce
alternatives (such as open office
and linux) increases the value of their
software; since more people are familar
with it (the value of software is
proportional to the user base). It's
hard to buy new recruits.... costly
actually.
Having thousands of children learn how
to use Microsoft software "for free" is
hugely valueable to Microsoft. This is
worth more than $300 million alone...
2. This money may be used to buy non-Microsoft software.
FACT: The software licenses "retail value
$800 million" are for Microsoft
software.
Perhaps some of the $300 million can
be used to buy non-Microsoft software,
but I doubt it.
I'd like to mention that RedHat has an alternative [1]
if Microsoft *really* wants to spend 1.1 Billion.
1. Microsoft just buys the hardware instead.
2. Open Source software is used (for free).
I'm afraid that Microsoft's play is just a mechanism
to extend their monopoly. It doesn't help anyone
but Microsoft.
Could you please air a correction?
Best,
Clark Evans
[1] http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/011120/202744_1.html
This is a much better outcome even if the consumers had "won".
No it's not, because for microsoft that's not a donation at all. Once they've written the software, each particular copy only costs them the price of a CDR - a mass-produced one at that, probably $0.50. By making more copies of windows to give away, they essentially print money: money in the form of a tax-writeoff. Each copy of MS-Windows donated to a charity gets MS a $300 tax writeoff (charitable donation, baby!) for a 50-cent disk, and serves to expand the Microsoft platform dominance.
Giving away windows is win-win-win for Microsoft. Just be aware: using their pricing for copies of windows distributed as part of the settlement inflates the actual value of that settlement by a factor of about 500, and helps to perpetuate their monopoly.
Red Hat's whole deal is free software, so why didn't they help out poor school districts a couple of years ago? Does anyone really think stunts like this are going to be enough to stop RHAT's downward spiral into dotcom obscurity?