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Microsoft Settles Be Antitrust Suit for $23.25M
ewhac writes "Without admitting wrongdoing, Microsoft today agreed to pay $23,250,000 to Be, Inc., to settle anti-trust claims against the software giant. The payout is anticipated to be used to complete the orderly dissolution of the company. Shortly after announcing sale of key assets to Palm, Be, Inc., filed suit against Microsoft in February 2002, alleging destruction of its business via illegal exclusionary and anti-competitive business practices."
The ending paragraph of that article is disturbing to say the least. Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software -- any time, any place and on any device. pshhhh... right. ;)
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
"Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software -- any time, any place and on any device." .....no comment
sorry the quote is so bad, but i think it perfectly illustrates MS's attitude towards all this legal stuff. that they are just so arrogant and think themseleves above it all.
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Be won't have the money to fight a really extended suit, Microsoft doesn't want to expend the manhours to defend itself, and $25m is in comparison a tiny molecule of water in the bucket.
To put this in perspective, consider the following math:
:-/
$8,072,000,000 net income for MSFT during the 9 months ended 3/31/03
divided by the (roughly) 270 days during the 9 months ended 3/31/03
...yields $29,000,000 net income per day for MSFT
so basically they destroyed Be, Inc., and it cost them roughly 18 *hours* of income.
just lovely
True, but you must understand that this is yet another chink in their armor. Once-invulnerable Microsoft has now had to settle a number of actions such as this. What they really didn't want was a full-dress jury trial where all of what Microsoft did to them would have been fleshed out for all to see.
What's more, it's very telling that a company with Microsoft's resources would settle rather than fight and "clear our name."
$23 mil is cheap when you have several billion in the bank.
This is chump change. They wiped out a competitor, and it's more like adding insult to injury.
Think of it like handing a bum, a panhandler, a nickel and telling him to shut up and go away.
A very small price to get a nuisance off your back.
Goals are deceptive - the unaimed arrow never misses.
It's great that Be's shareholders get a few dollars back for their pains, but they still certainly didn't come out ahead. But the real tragedy isn't the way about the investors -- it's about the millions of people who could have benefited from Be's amazing and innovative software, had Be been allowed to compete on anything remotely resembling a level playing field.
Hopefully more and more of Be's innovations will end up in Mac OS X and Linux. Then Be's achievements won't have been for naught.
Be has to get the deal approved by Judge Frederick Motz.. so things are not as dire as they seem. He has no real love for Microsoft.
As for 'not being able to afford going to court', well Be hired Susman/Godfrey on a contingency basis. So it looks like they went for the easy paycheck.
The essence of the "voluntary" dissolution of Be means that this money will not go to a sudden resurrection of the BeOS, as some have thought (foolishly hoped, perhaps).
Actually all the BeOS IP was sold to Palm, Inc (now PalmSource). Be, Inc. was kept in existence as a shell company for the sole purpose of persuing legal action. It didn't have the right to sell or develop BeOS if they wanted to.
Now that it's collected a bit of cash from MS it no longer needs to exist.
Incidentally, senior Be executives seemed to have pulled a NeXT on Palm Inc, taking over the key influence positions at PalmSource.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
People are able to rationalize a lot. I know I'm tripping over Godwin's Law, but it's going to take the equivalent of the "good Germans" being taken on concentration camp tours to drive home to MS employees the evil that they have participated in.
My Inudstrial Oraganization Econ. is a little rusty, by why so little money? If I recall, the Clayton and Sherman acts stipulate that if found guilty the party is responsible for 3 TIMES the damages caused. Be, Inc. is accepting that Microsoft only caused it about $7mil in damages? Others have already pointed out how little money $23mil is to Microsoft. Why wouldn't MS be extactic to settle for so little? We would Be give up so easily? In understand that proving the monopoly would be extremely complex and take years. All the same, it just seems that they could have gotten much more in court.
This is so true of most emplyees who work at Microsoft. I myself worked there for about three months in a sysadmin support type function and even with the Code Red outbreak crashing the internal Microsoft network to the point where even the call center couldn't route calls to support agents, they kept saying, "Microsoft is the greatest! Damn hackers did this."
I got the fscking out of there before being assimilated.
Your mom always said, a PB&J is better than nothing, and God is nothing, is a PB&J better than God?
Whenever someone brings suit against Microsoft, they always try to settle. There is no court proceedings in which facts will become public record. There is no innocent or guilty verdict. It's all very quiet, subtle, and quickly brushed aside from peoples' view and memory.
Reading the Complaint, Be appears to have had a very strong case. I cannot believe they would actually lose in court again Microsoft. (Then again, Microsoft do have an army of lawyers and unlimited monetary resources at their disposal.) By accepting this settlement, they do not demonstrate Microsoft had engaged in any wrong-doing. By all accounts, a mere 23 million is nothing to Microsoft and they come out as the winners.
Shame on you, Be. Why doesn't anyone actually take a stand these days? Microsoft says: "here's a lollipop, now shut the fuck up." People, unfortunately, take it without any consideration for the public good in the long-term.
Join Tor today!
Essentially, first click downloads the install program. Second click confirms "Do you want to run this, and install Debian as an alternate OS?" Most of the program then downloads off the internet.
Then, the program (1) Loads all system information that it can, into a file
(2) Loads the basic program onto the hard drive, plus all required debs, and checks the hashes.
(3) Installs startup program in Windows that gives the user an option "Would you like to change your default bootup setting to Linux? (Y/N/Don't ask again)"
(4) runs ScanDisk to clean the disk
(5) runs Defrag to defrag it.
(6) rewrites the floppy with a boot disk, and boots into Linux
(7) Partitions a standard user configuration onto the HDD (or onto the alternate HDD, if you so select, thus removing the need for repartitioning)
(8) Installs the Debs
(9) Installs LILO, with 20-second timeout, and default option being Windows bootup (the polite option).
(10) Sets a waiting screen "Your Debian Linux System is Installed. Please hit any key to reboot to Windows, or 'L' to continue with Linux for now, and explore your new OS!."
Such a system should also have a kind of "new hardware" wizard which reports back any new hardware that Debian developers have never seen.
It should also have an "Error Reporting" wizard, such that if the installation process fails, then when you return to Windows you have the option, "Report Error?"
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I agree. But Microsoft's concern with cash isn't like normal people's concern with cash, that if we use it unwisely or extravagantly, we'll run out. For MS, it's not always a matter of getting as much money for themselves as it is a matter of keeping it away from others, especially serious competitors (ie. those they want to "extinguish"). It's probably ok to hand over cash only after the extinguishing is done.
To maintain its monopoly, MS really must extinguish its competitors. If BeOS were easily dual-booted, more people would consider BeOS applications (the "OS barrier" would erode), and eventually more would be written (the "applications barrier" would erode). MS currently maintains both barriers, but if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to maintain the monopoly against all the competing and/or superior products out there. If MS doesn't completely destroy even small competitors, there will always be a foot in the door leading to further threats of competition.
What we really need is a competing OS that has a full suite of applications, both of which are freely developed by anyone who wishes to, rather than being controlled by a single corporation, and it will probably need to be possible to buy a computer with these pre-installed, for it to truly break both of the barriers mentioned above. Then, the only barrier will be in the mind -- the fact that people don't yet know about the potential of the OS and its applications, or that they're not yet ready to accept it over what it replaces. When that happens (it seems to be beginning), there will begin to be true competition for MS.
Now... MS products aren't all completely crap. But they must be seriously scared of anyone who can get their foot in the door, because a lot of their dominant products are dominant only because of monopoly. They're like someone viciously squashing mosquitos because they're terrified of West Nile virus.
Yeah, the situation did suck, but not because of Be. Read the various articles above yours. Be couldn't give it away for free because Microsoft wouldn't let them. PC manufacturers were forbidden to have another OS visibly installed, on pain of major financial hurt re: Windows licensing.
Maybe it's you that should STFU. Nobody wanted BeOS
Wrong. Be's legal complaint lists companies that wanted BeOS. Anmely Hitachi and Compaq, probably others as well.
IF BeOS were indeed a viable competent alternative to Windows... If someone really wants to compete with Windows, then they need to do everything Windows does
WRONG. Be was not trying to position BeOS as an alternative to Windows (at least not immediately). They were trying to position it as a COMPLEMENT to Windows. No OS can stand on it's own without a large application base. So Be positioned BeOS to be better than Windows for certain tasks so people could dual boot, get the benefit of Windows applications for some tasks, get the benefit of BeOS for other tasks, and more applications would be written for BeOS when there was an installed base of BeOS. Co-existing with Windows is a completely viable business plan.
Hell, it is a plan that could conceivably have lead to BeOS eventually replacing Windows, but that is irrelevant to the suit. Even without replacing Windows Be had a viable plan, and Microsoft illegally abused thier Monopoly to exterminate competition.
If you offered to give me a new engine for my car free of charge, an engine that gets 500 miles to the gallon, but I have to drive across the country to fill it up then I'm not going to yank my current engine out and install your engine. However, if I could install your engine in addition to mine, I might use it until it runs out of gas, then more likely than not I'll just switch back to my old engine and never give yours a second thought.
Exactly! And that is what Microsoft ILLEGALLY PREVENTED.
BeOS wanted people to be able to dual-boot Windows and BeOS. They wanted you to install that second engine for free. Once a number of people have that second engine installed then gas stations (applications) could start popping up locally.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
As an example, one manufacturer initially agreed to bundle BeOS with their computers in addition to Windows, making them dual-boot. (I think it was Sanyo, my memory's foggy.) Microsoft immediately jumped on them, and the "dual booting" machines ended up leaving the factory with BeOS installed but no way to access the BeOS partition. Buyers had no clue the operating system was even there.
And this was at a time when Microsoft had vanquished OS/2 by telling IBM they had a choice: Either they could have enough support to credibly offer Windows 95, or they could continue marketing OS/2. Linux was still considered a geek's toy, serious computer manufacturer's weren't taking any notice. So it really was an act against BeOS specifically, this wasn't part of some general attack on some major rival that wasn't Be.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
1. run "ver"
2. check for "MS" in output string
3. if "MS" is not found, give a vaguely worded error, and don't install Windows
And people wonder why I don't like Microsoft...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
it seems to have been missed but the $23 million to BE Inc was AFTER LEGAL FEES. Who knows how much they(lawyers) negotiated for. I'm with you though, Microsoft seems to have a standard of around $150 million which they'll pay for hijacked technology or will pay for the right to make sure Windows REMAINS DOMINANT( in this case ).
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus