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Microsoft Settlement For Private Suits Rejected
Lumpish Scholar writes: "Reuters story here. The judge "could not endorse the settlement ... Microsoft will have to start from scratch in negotiating a new settlement or fight the scores of suits in court."" Reuters also has an article from yesterday that looks at the positions of the various parties prior to this news. You will recall that Microsoft was proposing to settle the civil suits brought against it by donating free Microsoft software and old computers to schools. And do remember - because this always seems to confuse people - that the case brought by the Department of Justice and state governments is distinct from these suits filed by individuals.
This is awesome... the deal that was reached was so totally beneficial to Microsoft it would have made more sense if Microsoft had been suing the schools and the judgement was inflicted on them!
A flat-out $1 billion cash sum should do it.
Apple and others had objected on the grounds that by letting Microsoft give software and cheap hardware to schools, they were actually not out much money (since they just have to replicate their own software) and were reaping giant marketing benefits by pushing out Apple or other vendors.
It's at least a small victory.
Delay is better than letting Microsoft make their strategic investment, er, I mean penalty of installing their software a many new machines, likely displacing a lot of their competitors installations. The poor school districts could likely still have lots of old Macs in use.
end of line
It's already happening, and will continue. Have patience.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
This was a pre-trial settlement. Microsoft has not been found guilty of the allegations of over charging consumers.
These cases will now go to court.
But it's up to the claimants to prove that in a more competitive market the price would have actually declined. That was the allegation that Judge Jackson made in his court that spawned these lawsuits, but it was more of an assumption of the nature of monoply than really supported by facts.
It's highly unlikely that Microsoft will lose these cases, they simply tried to get a pre-trial settlement because it would have been cheaper than the legal costs of fighting in court, as well as derailing the negative publicity a court case causes.
That is why the proposed settlement cost seemed so low. It was a hedge, not a punishment.
how about give up cash and let the schools decide what goes on it?
Who the hell are we to say, "hey let's have them give hardware and have RH come in and put Linux on it" Talk about brainwashing.
From cnnfn there is a mention that the judges reasons are:
Judge Motz said he was not satisfied that there was enough value to the settlement and that the charitable institution would have been insufficiently funded.
Further, Judge Motz said the settlement "would raise antitrust concerns from the perspective of other software manufacturers" because the donation of free software could be construed as "court-approved predatory pricing."
Both these issues have been raised by many people and posted here on slashdot in the past.
... underdogs, and people like underdogs...
:)
I'll agree with this piece.
[apple] never encouraged tinkering and hacking by individuals
The entire development environment and documentation library for Mac OS-X is both free and pretty darn spiffy. Visual Studio is something like $500 to $1000 depending who you are and how you get it. Heck, my first Apple came with schematics and ROM assembly listings.
At least Microsoft freely release GW-Basic in the early days...
Apple gave away Basic before Microsoft even existed. Never for Macintosh, but I believe that was more for strategic reasons. Apple needed to force the applications to a dramatically higher level of usability. This required the armys of evangelists and much arm twisting. "modern" mid '80s gui applications were not going to be thrown together in the Basic of the days.
Microsoft has also supported the porting of Perl and Python (via Activestate) to the Windows environment.
Yes, now we can see if that was the embrace before the extend.
Microsoft's software has been typically cheaper than Apple's
I have no idea in what universe this is true. Actually, there is very little in the way of good comparisons. Office $400, Appleworks $99. But Appleworks is feature poor compared to Office. It does everything I need, so its a good deal for me (well, $0, I buy low end Macs where it is included). If I needed the extras Office has this would be a worthless comparison. IE? No comparison. Apple is still forbidden from suggesting that there may be other browsers much less making one. iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD? No competition. Likewise there are loads of MS apps with no comparison. OS prices? Upgrades are similarly priced. Development tools? No contest.
Remember Apple 's sordid attempt to foster clones?
Yes. Apple gave them the hardware reference designs and OS in the delusion that the cloners would make a wider variety of machines and attack niches. The cloners just built the reference designs with minor tweaks and sold them in to apple's highest margin market (early adopters) because the cloners could start selling the newer faster processers while they were still in short supply and Apple with their larger market had to wait for production to ramp up. (I believe at one point Apple was buying all the initial production of higher speed processors at a premium and warehousing them so they could get the fast machines out first. When you have to pay a premium to keep faster processors away from your users in order to promote your platform something has gone wrong.) The media savaged Apple for offering slow machines. Apple lost sales. The platform didn't gain . Apple didn't revoke the cloners licenses (except one, they bought that back) they just raised the OS price so the cloners paid the same per machine for the OS as apple. Without the OS subsidy to pocket the cloners left the business.
I am glad tho that I do not have to pick between the lesser of two evils
Me too. I suspect any corporation with a 90%+ market share will be bad for the users. God knows what GPL v9 will look like when free software has 90% of the market.