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Be Sues Microsoft for Violations of Antitrust Laws

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the timing-timing dept.

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 ..."

6 of 652 comments (clear)

  1. You knew it would happen. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  2. You could see this suit coming.... by davidebsmith · · Score: 4, Informative
    if you read the press release about the Asset Purchase Agreement under which Be sold almost everything to Palm:

    Pursuant to the terms of the asset purchase agreement, Be retained certain rights, assets and liabilities in connection with the transaction, including its cash and cash equivalents, receivables, certain contractual liabilities under in-licensing agreements, and rights to assert and bring certain claims and causes of action, including under antitrust laws. Be is in the process of investigating the merits and potential value of pursuing the retained claims and causes of action. Be has not yet brought any such claim or cause of action. Under the terms of the plan of dissolution, if, notwithstanding the approval of the dissolution and the adoption of the plan of dissolution by the stockholders of Be, the board of directors of Be determines that it would be in the best interests of Be's stockholders or creditors for Be not to dissolve, including in order to permit Be to pursue (or more easily pursue) any retained claims or causes of action, the dissolution of Be may be abandoned or delayed until a future date to be determined by Be's board of directors. Regardless of whether Be dissolves, Be will not continue to exist as an operating entity.
    (emphasis added)
  3. Re:Unpopular opinion follows by RelliK · · Score: 5, Informative
    Oh please! Let's beat the dead horse again.

    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.
  4. Re:need to prove Intel/Microsoft collusion by Asmodean · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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.
  5. Re:Boot Loader lockout workaround (hint hint OEMs. by Alderete · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:About 20-40 billion smackers? by Brian+Kendig · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.