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Be Sues Microsoft for Violations of Antitrust Laws
Eugenia writes: "While Be, Inc had the information for over 3 years that Microsoft 'through a series of illegal exclusionary and anticompetitive acts designed to maintain its monopoly in the Intel-compatible PC operating system market and created exclusive dealing arrangements with PC OEMs prohibiting the sale of PCs with multiple preinstalled operating systems' they filed a suit against Microsoft only today. Today Be employes a single person in a tiny office in Mountain View. Great ..."
Be assets were bought by Palm Computing...
When Be had an agreement to ship pre-installed on laptops from a major distributor (I forget, was it HP?) Microsoft stepped in and said "did you read your license agreement? You can install other operating systems if you want, but you cannot boot from them or display how to get to them." So the machines shipped with Be installed, but most people never knew it. This cost Be quite a bit of money.
They tried to get the DoJ to use this in the antitrust trial, but the DoJ said that their case was for illigal tying, not for exclusionary agreements. DoJ urged Be to go to trial separately.
When BeOS was purchased not too long ago, they reserved the right to sue MS based on the judgement of the court in the DoJ trial. Since it appears that the DoJ sold out, Be is finally doing what they should have done earlier.
Better late than never. Good luck, Be!
As above. Palm Inc of PalmOS fame owns Be's assets etc including their IP and the OS. Perhaps this has something to do with that? No idea why Palm would want to hassle MS.
---- Drinahn
Of course he is. Dan Johnston, longtime general counsel for Be, is now the CEO (and receptionist, and IT staff).
From the early license agreements, Netscape was free for educational use. Businesses and personal non-educational use required you to pay for the license. I remember seeing boxed copies for sale all over the place back in 1995. It was available for nearly every flavor of *NIX, Mac, and Winblowz. They sold the "killer app" that made the web a household name. There's no reason they couldn't still be licensing Navigator to this day; except for one: Microshaft's fear.
Microshaft pissed in the punchbowl. They dumped an inferior web browser (everything before IE 3.0 was a joke) on consumers and killed of what could have been a serious cash cow. They did this because they couldn't compete on any real merit (typical Microsoft there) so they undercut the competion on price relying on the OS monopoly to fund the dumping untill they drove the competitor out. They did this with word processors, and spreadsheets if you ever stop to wonder what happened to WordPerfect and Lotus 123. The OS monopoly funds screw-up after screw-up of crappy versions and learning while eating into the competitors customer base with cheap prices. By the time version 3 is out, they've cought up. This "business strategy" works great if you've got the cash to burn and nobody to answer to for doing it since smaller companies don't get to spend years screwing up at least three times .
My point is this: Netscape's complaint is more than legit. Microsoft's monopoly/preditory practices go way further than Netscape or BeOS as well. With the finding of facts to go on, over $20,000,000,000.00USD (yes folks, that's over TWENTY BILLION in the bank), a huge list of enemies, a corporate culture of arrogance, and the current economic slump, they're a prime target to get swamped with lawsuits for the next 5 to 10 years.
It's been a long time coming, they more than deserve it, and I for one am looking forward to watching the show.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Signing exclusive agreements is NOT illegal!
This has been covered extensively in the antitrust decision (which, BTW, was upheld unanimously by 9 appelate judges). The exclusive agreements are illegal when you have a monopoly in that particular market. Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market. (*) Therefore, the exclusive agreemets are illegal. End of story. You'd do well to actually get a clue before spouting nonsense.
(*) Oh, and before some moron decides to beat the "MS is not a monopoly" horse, I will not argue with that. I'll merely point out that the district judge and 9 appellate judges disagree with you. And they probably understand the laws a bit better than you.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
"However, nobody put a gun to the head of the OEM's who produced single system PC's. To win this case, you would need to demonstrate that the contracts between Microsoft and OEM's violated antitrust laws."
I used to work for a small OEM and yes, MS could hurt them too. This small OEM had bussiness sales and most of those companies wanted computers with windows. If our OEM could not provide them with it (ie if MS cut them off) then they would have gone to an OEM that could provide it.
I have the "Microsoft Windows NT Server and Windows NT Workstation OEM Preinstallation Kit" booklet right here in front of me. I'll quote you some of the more juicy bits:
"To comply with the terms of your OEM license agreement, you must conform to the requirements and restrictions described in the sections that follow."
"You must preinstall Windows NT using one of the two methods described in this book; you may not preinstall Windows NT using any other method."
"You must preinstall Windows NT on the hard drive of every computer that you ship to a user."
"You cannot ship only a compact disc containing the Windows NT operating system; Windows NT must also be preinstalled on the computer's hard drive."
"You can install ONLY the Windows NT 4.0 operating system on a computer. You cannot include an additional operating system (such as Windows NT 3.51, windows 95 or Windows 3.1) unless you have a seperate legal agreement with Microsoft."
There are some of the restrictions word for word. There are a bunch of other things like the computer has to boot directly into windows, which rules out lilo. You also can't modify/delete almost anything including the IE start or search pages.
It's a good thing the world sucks or we'd all fall off.
Not quite correct. More accurate: "There's Win9x, which traditionally used DOS as a boot loader, and has the ability to revert to 16-bit DOS drivers for some hardware if no 32-bit native Windows drivers exist, and there's NT, which is a completely different operating system."
Again, somewhat incorrect. Microsoft's removal of the ability to boot into DOS mode in ME is a side effect of moving to the NT OS Loader for booting Win9x, rather than using DOS to boot Win9x. This was a good move, both because the NT Loader is a much better boot loader than DOS, and it also gets consumers ready for the switch to XP by slowly introducing NT concepts (The non-DOS boot loader, for example).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/24134.html
0 001/0827_hacker.html Byte's take on the bootloader issue.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/21410.html The register's summary of this Byte article:
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1115/byt20010824s
daniel teske
Be's stock closed at twelve cents today. $500 would buy just over 4,000 shares.
:-D
So, what are the odds of Be being able to siphon off a billion or two from MS?
Actually, Be did exactly this. I know, because I wrote some of the docs for it.
And guess what? It didn't work.
The fact is, sticking in a floppy and a sheet of paper is vastly inferior to having the software appear in front of the user when they boot.
So, you can get around the letter of the license agreement with this tactic, but you can't get the same market leverage. And it's market leverage that pays the bills, not a "clever" legal trick.
Palm does not own Be. Be sold its assest to Palm.
Actually, didn't Be once make headlines by offering to give its operating system for free to any PC vendor who would sell BeOS preinstalled on its PC's? Either as the sole operating system on its PC's, or set up as a dual-boot with Windows?
Still nobody took Be up on it. Even adding a free operating system to their PC's would have incurred so many penalties from Microsoft that no PC vendor wanted to take the hit.