Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Offers A Modified Settlement
inepom01 writes: "Just read a story here about Microsoft offering a different settlement proposal- this one would have two other companies join in on the foundation MS is establishing- Connectix and Key Curriculum Press. Since Connectix makes software that lets Windows programs work on Macs, seems like same old Microsoft tricks." gnovos points to another story at MSNBC on the shifting terms of this proposal.
What people seem to forget is that Microsoft has destroyed companies, hurt consumers, and generally played the all-around bad guy, and yet no only do they get to propose a "penalty" (I use that term lightly), but they get to propose a penalty that actually tightens their stranglehold!
Apple always did well in the school market, and now they have to stand aside as Microsoft "punishes" their way massively into that market.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Why would Microsoft need Connectix to provide copies of Virtual PC? Seems like it could only be an attempt to put Windows on Macs. After all, MS Office is avaliable for Mac. I'm sure suitable Mac alternatives could be found for other windows products.
Or perhaps Microsoft would like to point out that Macs make for very slow windows machines.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
For all the ideas that get tossed about, why dont' we create a slashdot settlement? Everybody chips in and tells the DOJ in plain words what's wrong with the microsoft ideas, and then proposes a fair settlement(s), and discusses why it's a better idea.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further."
*coo-ahh* *coo-ahh*
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
Somebody please explain to me how anything MS offers will punish it for overcharging consumers for Windows.
1. A $1billion pay out in software, hardware, and support is nothing, especially extended over a few years. MS grosses $1billion a *month* on its products. So they would pay fines equivalent to one month of income at most.
2. Making the schools choose their tech needs is cool, but if MS charges less directly than on the open market (see article quote from MS Spokeman) then why would schools select anything else?
3. What refurb'ed computers will be used? And wouldn't that mean running older versions of Windows? I'm guessing most schools aren't likely to buy older Macs.
4. What made Steve Jobs speak out so loudly about this? He's been very quiet on bashing MS, even after MS got rid of their non-voting investment some time back. He sent Avie to testify about MS wanting to "knife the baby" of QuickTime. Does he really feel secure to bash MS now, or is it that Apple really, really threatened by cheap MS software being given to schools? I'm guessing the latter since mercurial Steve was relatively restrained in his response and the legal brief Apple provided.
5. What happens when the support money (a paltry amount IMHO) runs out? Do the schools get stuck paying for support on old equipment running old software that isn't supported by their makers anymore?
I don't have a great solution. I'd prefer to see the schools be given a lump sum of money to invest in whatever they want (like textbooks or infrastructure improvements) rather than allow MS to get even further entrenched in one market they don't completely push around today.
Instead of the normal round of complaints, sometimes insightful comments, and mostly junivile comments, why not get involved and subimt something.
Information on the United States v. Microsoft Setlement
The Tunney Act sets forth procedures that must be followed whenever the United States proposes to settle a civil antitrust suit through entry of a consent decree. Pursuant to the Tunney Act, members of the public have an opportunity to comment on the proposed settlement before it is accepted by the court.
There, all the linkage you need.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
No, it's not like that at all.
1. This is a *settlement* in a *civil case*.
2. It was architected primarily by the lawyers who brought this suit in the first place.
3. A $1 billion charge is not necessarily a "win-win" for Microsoft. I'd challenge you to rethink your biases on that.
4. In what way would Connectix be a "tool of Microsoft"? By sitting on an independent committee that doles out software? Again, I'd challenge you to rethink your biases on that.
5. How would "Connectix...be toast"? How does Microsoft "need" Connectix? If Microsoft wanted to "toast" them, they could now. And there are plenty of other companies MS could suggest for this committee. Nothing special about Connectix.
I know you were being funny, but remember a while back when ,mayor Marion Barry was caught on video tape buying/using crack, convicted, served his sentence, and then got re-elected mayor of DC? He didn't exactly sentence himself back to being mayor, but you would have thought the legal system might have prevented him from obtaining a position in which he previously abused the power....
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Nobody is missing the point except the idiots who keep asking why Microsoft gets to pick its own punishment. It's not! This is a settlement. Must we define what a settlement is?
They went to court, they lost, they appealed and then they went to settlment talks. The government could refuse to settle and move on to trial. If Microsoft lost at that point and did not appeal or lost on appeal, they wouldn't get any say in their punishment. Well, they would get to plead their case for punishment A or B, but it's not as if they have to agree to their punishment.
Is it possible to have an intelligent discussion on anything related to Microsoft?
Why is it that posts that ask why Microsoft gets to "decides its own punishment", which is obviously false, get modded up, but others that explain the reality of the sitation don't?
Forget the whales - save the babies.
As you know, Microsoft's first version leaves a lot to be desired, but they successively improve each subsequent version. They same goes for their legal arguments:
... errrr ... business.
Version 1.0: We are shocked, truly shocked that you'd think monopolistic practices are going on here!
Version 2.0: Oooooh!! Judge Jackson is sooooo mean to us.
Version 3.0: The country's at war, the economies in the toilet. If you DOJ staff / State AG's / Judges will just roll over and play dead, we can get on with world domina
[Insert pithy quote here]
My wife's school has 25 new (as of 2 years ago) Dell computers with m$ installed on them.
.. nor do they have the funds to obtain it. And to top it all off .. they school system is *NOT* allowed to take volenteer help. [I already offered to set them up for them] They belong to the school union, and I dont.
.. how many think they would be anywhere CLOSE to guessing right ?
they have all kinds of scanners, and networking equipment.
This was all donated via M$ as part of their Digital Divite plan. [My Wife works in a low income targed school]
Do you know how effective these machines are in this environment ?
they are still in their original packaging. There is no one on the school staff that has the ability to set up a network , let alone install software and keep it running. There is no internet access to the school
Great donation. some 50k of machines and software (har har) at the time. Yet my wife's teaching budget of $900.00 isn't enough for her to get enough of even the most basic of art supplies for her 350+ students.
Since it was a donation, the school board is not allowed to sell it. And use the $$.
So these things do *NO* good to anyone [exept microsoft and i suppose dell] because of the tax breaks.
If microsoft REALLY wants to help education, they should turn part of their marketing machine on the prospect of paying teachers a salery WORTH what they deserve. If my wife got $1 for each child a day that she teaches [WAY cheap for a babysitter] she would double her salery now.
that means she gets less than five CENTS an hour to teach a child. [per child of course]
if the average american parent we're to guess how much their student's teachers were paid to care for them a day
donate computers to schools indeed. Why not just put the money into their research department, and *SAY* they are developing a plan to improve schools ? Same effect.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Inspired by the terms of the Microsoft settlement, where Microsoft settles by mostly donating CD-ROMs of its software, at a cost of 1/3 of a cent per disc (market value $799), the US Government has declared it will immediately discontinue its practice of paying tax refunds from treasury funds, and instead print new money for any further refunds.
Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill said, "I have learned that it only costs us 6 cents to print a dollar bill. In fact it only costs 6 cents to print any denomination, so I'll be printing a bunch of hundreds for every American."
President Bush praised the plan by saying "We can immediately gave every Americans a tax rebate of $100,000 dollars, at a minimalum cost to the governement. That will really kick-start our economy. That will show the terrorists we won't back down." President Bush added that anyone who disagrees with his plan will suffer the same fate as terrorists.
In appreciation for his excellent idea, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Bill Gates will be presented a half-million dollar award from the US Government, at a lavish banquet, paid for with the newly-printed dollars.
Interestingly, Mr. Gates requested his award be given to him in the form of gold bars rather than printed currency.
Microsoft proposes changes
December 10, 2001: 12:51 p.m. ET
Software maker seeks to modify private settlement to deflect criticism.
Microsoft Corp. is offering to modify the proposed settlement of private antitrust lawsuits to deflect criticism it would simply extend its software monopoly by donating reduced-priced software, computers and training to schools.
This concerns a private class-action suit which may or may not have merit, NOT the DOJ sellout. Pay attention people!
sulli
RTFJ.
(I know this message will probably be marked troll, but here goes)
...seems like same old Microsoft tricks.
Would you guys just grow up? Did it ever occure to you that it is the responsibility of every employee, executive, and board member of a company to do everything in their power (including 'old tricks') to try and beat out the competition? If they don't, they are committing a crime against their own company (and against the principles of capitalism for that matter).
_______
2B1ASK1
(thanks go to Bill C. from the lugwash list)
2 00 11207001012102
Send this to Judge Motz - Wired reports that he's only got 200 complaint letters so far.
U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz
Garmatz Federal Courthouse, Suite 4415
101 West Lombard St.
Baltimore, MD 21201
It is my belief that the proposed antitrust settlement with Microsoft
Corporation is not in the best interests of the American people. It
does not protect against future abuses and in fact encourages the
spread of the Microsoft software monopoly by training a vast army of
young people to use their operating system and attendant application
programs to the exclusion of very viable software alternatives.
America is based on freedom of choice; but students in Americas'
public schools can only learn to use computers, an essential skill
for the coming generation of employees, on the products provided to
them. Today, the Dept. of Justice has an opportunity to broaden the
scope of that choice and thus empower generations yet unborn. It also
has the opportunity to cave in to Bill Gates and thus must choose
between greatness and ignominy.
The Northern Territories school district in Australia, with a
population of just over 200,000, finds that it saved $1,000,000 in
the first year alone by using Linux alongside Microsoft products to
provide computer education at all grade levels. This was enough to
allow the school district to purchase an additional 1,000 computers
for distribution in the schools and as loaner units for students (and
their parents) to use at home. In a few short years their children
will be competing, very effectively, on the worldwide intellectual
marketplace against American children whose access to hardware was
hampered by the prohibitive cost imposed by the practice of using
Microsoft products all but exclusively in the public schools. The
Australian experience could have been dramatically more productive
had they used Linux as the operating system on all their computers
but it was a good initial step. The present savings represent its use
in their servers only.
http://opensourceschools.org/article.php?story=
I support the notion that Microsoft should pay its fine in hardware
donations only. It has been brought to my attention that Red Hat
Software of Research Triangle Park, NC, (near Durham, NC) has offered
to provide pro-bono copies of the Linux operating system
corresponding to a Microsoft donation of hardware. It is my desire
that any donation of software that Microsoft might choose to make
would not be included in the proposed settlement but must also be a
pro-bono gesture corresponding to the Red Hat Software offer.
Moreover, any copies of software Microsoft might donate should
require no payment of any sort by the schools at any forward point in
time. It must be a true donation of indefinite duration, just as the
Red Hat offer is. Otherwise, if required to pay, the schools would
eventually have to abandon their training programs for lack of funds
to re-license / upgrade their software.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/011120/202744_1.html
While Microsoft Corporation should not be excluded from expressing
generosity, such generosity, expressed as software gifts, only
furthers their ability to monopolize the marketplace and should not
be permitted as a part of the penalty for having followed illegal
practices in the establishment of their dominance in the software
market.
Microsoft has painted itself the champion of choice and freewill
while villifying open-source software as being un-American. I think
it is time for their actions, public and private, to match their very
public words.
Software donations should be no part of the proposed settlement.
- passion
that means she gets less than five CENTS an hour to teach a child. [per child of course]
Even with overcrowded classrooms, that would work out to at most $2 an hour, which can't be accurate. Your earlier $1 per child per day figure would work out to (using the most unrealistic timesheets) no more than $6 an hour, again not accurate. I worry that people will pay too much attention to your clearly invalid numbers and ignore your (quite correct) points.
My father teaches high school in one of the most underfunded states in the union... with years of experience, he makes over $30K a year before taxes, or around $15 an hour. It's not babysitter wages, but it's still quite a small amount if you expect to be able to hire people more competent than babysitters. It's less than he made in either of his two previous careers (not even considering inflation), and it's half of what many of my friends make straight out of college. Every teacher working in America's public schools is doing so either because they gave up much more lucrative job opportunities out of some sense of altruism or because they really can't find a better job. I'm cynical enough to be surprised that the first group isn't extremely rare, but the second group is still adequately represented.
I agree that teachers are underpaid, but it's important to understand why: the reason isn't some abstract ideal of fairness.
Ideally, we'd be paying teachers enough to make it a financially competitive job, and using the influx of new applicants to actually fire the least competent current teachers regularly. Isn't that what you do when hiring for any other job, make sure you're paying enough to have a full applicant pool to choose from? The current methods for avoiding incompetent teachers generally involve making them jump through years of easy "how to teach" classes and certification hoops, and I suspect for every illiterate they weed out there's at least one scientist they scare off.
Welcome to monopoly economics 101, wherein we will detail why you are wrong and I am right. Err, I mean why you're misguided about capitalism/monopolies vs the Free Market.
See, there's this interesting thing called competition. It's the drive to succeed. In a free market, it is competition that drives prices down, all the way to the point where one of two outcomes happen:
Now, I know I just said that those are the only two outcomes, and if I were talking about theoretical economics, I'd be correct. So let's revise that to allow for product differentiation and brand loyalty. Now, goods are no longer interchangeable, and so competing firms are no longer forced to subsistence-level earning. Now, differentiation can also lead to introduction of competition back into a monopolized market (differentiation is brought about by R&D, which often has a side-effect of reducing operating costs by researching newer and more efficient production methods. lower overhead means the ability to charge a lower price, and thus slip into that monopoly market where the price was previously below your costs). In other words, the free market fixes these situations. The old policy of Laissez Faire was the best policy, in regards to government involvement in the marketplace. A free market works best when it's not shackled by government (because government *never* works efficiently, which puts it totally at odds with the goals of a free market). Yes, I know the event that changed the US's policy was the Great Depression, but what most people conveniently forget is that our current welfare state was only meant to last for a duration of 5-10 years or so, just long enough to get the economy back on its feet after the depression. FDR never intended things like welfare and social security to extend past a generation at the most, and realistically no more than needed to get out of the Depression. But here we are, with a socialist mindset where we expect the government to take care of us and protect us from the big mean capitalists. And we're going into another recession, so it's not even like these social welfare plans stopped that (which, btw, is the natural ebb and flow of a free market. it goes up, and it comes down. and it goes up again, and so on. we can help "flatten" the wave by having lower highs and higher lows, mainly by doing things like manipulating interest levels to encourage spending or saving as appropriate, but we can't make the cycle go away).
Anyway, I would argue that the free market was the foundation of our way of life, but no longer is. We're well on our way to becoming a socialist nation like many European nations (the day I pay 50% of my salary in taxes is the day I move to Mexico), and too many consumers have forgotten the fundamentals of a free market, instead preferring to have the warm safety blanket of Big Brother Government to keep them safe and warm at night, and scare the Evil Capitalists out from under their beds.
bullshit. Name 5 executives who were sentenced to jail time for violating antitrust laws.
How about 50? Though that's only from 1999-2000. Here's it broken down over the past decade by number of convictions and time spent in jail.
A little hasty, weren't we.