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California Microsoft Settlement
Lord Prox writes "From news.com.com: A California judge on Friday gave preliminary approval to a landmark settlement under which Microsoft will pay $1.1 billion to settle a class-action suit that claimed it overcharged consumers for Windows.
More Townsend and Townsend and Crew is info from the law firm here. Also note... you get vouchers in settlement good for buying computer related items, not just Microsoft products and/or can be traded and converted to cash!"
California agrees to a ten year, $10 billion Microsoft contract.
A California judge on Friday gave preliminary approval to a landmark settlement under which Microsoft will pay $1.1 billion to settle a class-action suit that claimed it overcharged consumers for Windows
I pirated a copy and feel ripped off !!
That's good and all, i'm glad to see they are trying to do something about it...but..why couldn't the price been just a little more? $5 to $29 is not going to make up for the companies who have spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on microsoft products through the last 10 years or so. It's ridiculous.
fp?
your sins into me, oh my beautiful one.
I wish i didn't live in a sucky country which wimped out of nailing Microsoft to a target and announcing open season. Is it too late to organise a class action do you think? They must have commited another antitrust violation today or something, or do they take the weekends off?
Here's hoping that exactly none of this money is used to buy upgrades to Windows XP.
Beep beep.
Cnet says : Two-thirds of the unclaimed money will go to California public schools in a mix of donated Microsoft software and cash grants."
Microsoft should make it a habit of getting sued by states so that it can spread its software into the schools more effectively. I'm sure that the cash is also tax deductible. You go Bill!
In linux libertas
They didn't want to risk having to deal with a Governor who's also a Terminator.
A California judge on Friday gave preliminary approval to a landmark settlement under which Microsoft will pay $1.1 billion to settle a class-action suit that claimed it overcharged consumers for Windows.
Isn't it great when you're so rich you can break the law, then simply reimburse the people you scammed when, sometimes, they notice and react ? How many people got ripped off and never got their money back because they didn't have the time or energy to fight back big bad Microsoft ?
Did the hordes of people who wanted to buy bare computers but couldn't find any, and had a Windows license forced down their throats, get their money back yet ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
So Microsoft admits that they overcharged for the price of Windows--does this mean that the price of Windows will now go down?
Don't forget, California has a $30-40 billion dollar shortfall this year. They're stuggling to find any source of cash they can... I'm sure they settled because they need an infusion of cash NOW...
Remember... when you can't walk away from the deal, there's no negotiation.
MS Dos is included but not Windows 3.x.
Is this some kind of attempt to get M$ moving on the rumoured increases in its' dividend rate? Were the California shareholders just excessively impatient?
Of course, after living in California a few years now, I can assure you that you had better be a Microsoft-sized company if you expect to survive here. The place is insanely litigous, the State Senate and State Assembly routinely pass absurd legislation that inflicts high costs on companies gullible enough to do business here, and the cost of living is driving this place into a two-tiered society; the wealthy and those who serve them.
Consider this just one more warning to other businesses tempted by this fabled "market of 34 million consumers". Chalk up this settlement next to hundreds of others, the recent tripling of workman's compensation insurance premiums (which is driving out hundreds of small companies and manufacturers), and the recent brilliance of our state government regarding taxes. The state's income tax system is very "progressive" meaning that high earners are heavily taxed and lesser earners are not taxed at all. Our brilliant legislature recently opted only to increase the income tax rates on the high earners. This is the very approach that got us in such a budget mess in the first place. The low earners vote for dozens of unaccountable spending programs that are paid for by the high earners. When the high earners get clobbered (read NASDAQ collapses onto Silicon Valley), the state government goes begging to support all those programs. Eventually, the state will be entirely populated by a wealthy few, some inland farmers, and those who serve the wealthy and depend on government programs to cope with the uniformly high cost of living. At least the ailing public schools will have a few copies of Windows 98 "donated" by Microsith. Be sure to check out microsith.com!
Hey Californians, last one out, turn off the lights!
In principio erat Verbum.
I love it. Part of the settlement administration website, managed by Rust consulting Inc., "... a class act in claims administration", located at http://microsoftcalsettlement.com/ is run on Microsoft IIS 5.0. I havn't seen the exact language of the settlement yet (does it cover Microsoft OSs more recent than Win05/98?) so it's hard to tell whether Rust Consulting Inc. will be filling out their own forms on their own website to claim their settlement coupons for their overpayment fot the OS running their website (or notifying their histing provider to do so).
-- CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
"Get Adobe to port linux to photoshop."
;) Though, the I hear the GNU team did make an operating system out of a text-editor, once...so an image manipulator may not be all that hard! ;)
I think that would take a little more than a billion dollars
(This post is funny. If you don't think it is, buy yourself a sense of humor.)
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
1. Overcharge by $40/copy.
2. Agree to refund $5 to $29/copy.
3. Profit!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The rest goes to the lawyers. Isn't mass tort law great?
Jason
ProfQuotes
Two-thirds of the unclaimed money will go to California public schools in a mix of donated Microsoft software and cash grants. Although the maximum value of the settlement is $1.1 billion, Microsoft could end up paying as little as $367 in cash, which is what it would owe to California public schools if no vouchers are claimed. If all vouchers are claimed, Microsoft would be required to pay the maximum, but schools would then get nothing.
.net developers tools. Wheres linux or bsd in the mix?
Long paste, but I have 2 concerns.
1. Are the software calculated at RETAIL. Very bad if they get to use these prices. Here in Redmond, if you have a buddy who works for m$ you can get stuff for dirt cheap, 15 bux for keyboard cheap.
2. This would just give all the schools Microsoft windows to run on all its desktops, with a copy of office and maybe even
They don't want to go and spend $500 million restructuring everything, replacing all their Windows software with Linux software that may not be written yet, and training their endusers, probably.
Do you really think that ANY of the software currently in existence will resemble the software running when today's elementary students graduate from highschool?
There were HUGE changes in the last four years, but the current evidence is that the rate of change is still increasing.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Windows 95 has fallen out of support and besides that, most people have gotten a new PC since then with ME or XP handcuffed to it. 98 is falling (has fallen?) out of support and even that has been largely replaced by newer versions (like it or not). How many people still hang on to their old licenses after the software is trash? There's gonna be like 10 claims from geeks swiping the license from granny's computer. Everyone else has trashed 'em or just don't give a crap about 16 bucks.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Many years ago Bank of America lost a class action lawsuit for some dubious practices. For example, make a deposit and write a check the same day. Odds are, the check will bounce and incur a hefty overdraft fee. After BoA settled I received a letter stating I could claim my portion by filling out the enclosed form, etc. etc., and I would receive vouchers good for banking services at BoA. Excuse me? What makes you think I would ever again trust them with my money?
I'll bet some lawyers made some serious money in the case, though.
-- Will program for bandwidth
"...can be traded and converted to cash"
Better hope the settlement money can't be converted into campaing funds!
(Inside joke. You have to be a Californian to understand what Gray Davis is going to do with that money.)
Townsend and Townsend and Crew, the law firm that filed the suit, described Friday's ruling as "the largest recovery of a monopoly overcharge ever achieved in the United States and the largest recovery ever achieved under the antitrust laws of California."
Uh, yeah, and like most of these types of lawsuits, the trial lawyers get the bulk of the spoils and the consumer gets peanuts. The firm partners all get to build new wings on their homes and the consumer get their $5 to $29. Big consumer victory, what a joke. Sorry, but my contempt for what the legal profession has become overshadows anything wrong Microsoft might have done. And of course, the geeks applaud this outcome, because they can't get over their hang-ups on Microsoft without seeing the bigger picture, which is how out of control lawsuits have become in American society and how the legal system has become a tool of legalized terror against businesses and individuals. You need not look any further than what the RIAA is engaged in. Think about that before you yell "yeah, fsck Microsoft!"
I don't know about that. Windows has had the same basic user interface since 1995 (windows 95). While the core technologies have changed (9x codebase to NT), the look and feel haven't changed that much. As far as the end-user is concerned, I don't think the GUI will change that much in the near future. Maybe when Longhorn is finally finished it'll have a new codebase and some different methods of searching for files on the PC, but I bet someone who has only used Windows 95 will have little trouble learning to use it because of the similarities in the GUI. In essence, technology changes rapidly, yes. But, interfaces change slowly. We're still using the same basic I/O's we have for decades... keyboard and mouse. The GUI of operating systems will likely change very little in the near future as well b/c people like what they have now and don't want any radical changes. I hear all this talk about AI agents, voice communication with a PC, etc. etc... but, I don't see it happening for another decade or two at least -- maybe longer. It's still faster to type than to talk for most PC users. Perhaps we'll have a few more buttons on our keyboards and mice for "hot key" functions and maybe a few voice commands. Maybe Windows will put a few interesting things in their OS like virtual folders and stacking folders since with a database filesystem files can be in more than one folder at the same time... or a few new things here and there to the OS... I wouldn't be surprised if almost ALL software 10 years from now looks almost identical to today's except with more menus, options, and prettier colors. Word hasn't changed so much that it's unrecognizable from its first release. Neither have packages such as AutoCAD or the internet service provider AOL. (I had AOL instant messaging way back in 1995 and it's not that much different now in 2003)
When I started high school the district bought a roomful of PC's networked with Novel Netware. Anyone else remember the big leap (around 11th grade) from DOS based Word Processors to Windows based? Hell I still remember the vulcan-neckpinch commands needed to operate WordPerfect. At this point I was writing device drivers in C for DOS. (Gasp, I still have the reference manual for all of the interrupt handlers for DOS 5 and 6.)
In college I had to buy a Macintosh. Claris Works was my friend. My junior year they suddenly switched to PC's. I was on Coop an had to navigate MS Office. And just when people started to get good with NT, Linux came out. I moved on to scripting languages and SQL.
What have I learned from all this? Basically how to learn. Everything else is just details.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
This is totally off topic, but look at the report at CAFR.
In short it says: "The State of California at the State-level has approximately $63.39 billion of the taxpayer's money it is not using, i. e. surpluses equal to $1,790 for every man, woman and child in California or $7,158 for a family of 4. This does not include all the additional surpluses that exist in the school districts, cities, or counties in California."
This is not made up - the information comes from the California State Controller's Office. Read the report and then get mad as Hell. They are struggling alright; struggling to get more of your money! Bunch of damned crooks - Democrats and Republicans alike.
Cool, man. When the tobacco companies were getting sued left and right a decade ago, they should have negotiated a settlement where they donated cigarettes to schools.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Perhaps I'm being suspicious, but doesn't this claim process give the state of California the option of finding out those computer users who bought computers (eg. Dell, Gateway, PDA's) out of state, but didn't pay their local state tax? Claimants have to provide: proof of purchase, home address, and the software licenses purchased ....