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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."
While $23 million is peanuts to MS, it makes you wonder why they would even bother settling this, it's not like Be had the resources to fight them in court.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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...
Yeah, but it's pretty standard boilerplate in a settlement that the settling party admits no wrongdoing.
It's mostly to keep it from being used against them later in court, when other people sue them for the same type of thing.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The suit was about MS pressuring OEMs to not install other OSes on hard drives of machines they shipped. They did NOT want to see a dual-boot situation.
One of the big issues is getting end-users to install another OS. Since most people never have to install an OS, it is a daunting concept no matter how easy it is.
The whole effort in making Linux so easy to install derived from this.
Now, with the settlement, MS doesn't have to defend this practice in court. They don't admit guilt and can keep on pressuring OEMs to not install alternatives to Windows on new machines.
$23+ million is chump change if it avoids getting dragged into court and having this practice under scrutiny.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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
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).
Be Inc wisely (I think) dissolved "voluntarily" and did its best to ensure that investors did not get the short end of the stick. Be sold off all their intellectual property to Palm, and passed the cash amongst stock owners, minus costs. Be then had a single purpose - pursue the MS lawsuit. This money will be passed about, minus expences, to stock holders.
Then all Be will be is a trademarked logo.
Microsoft calls it 'Freedom to Innovate', everybody else calls it 'Freedom to Violate'.
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.
"Damnit! We should have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft instead of Big Blue!" -- Darl
Last I checked YellowTAB (http://www.yellowtab.com) is working on a new release of BeOS (which really is a nice OS), called zeta, and has collected most of the IP rights to the old BeOS. I wonder if/hope they see some of this.
Let me tell you a story. I once worked for a company that was able to charge a lot of money for an adequate product. There was no competition, so we could pretty much name our price. We had to keep quality at a tolerable level, but not the level the customer really wanted. We tended to use processes and equipment that was quite old.
These factors caused many economic problems. The company had money, but was not developing or consuming new technology at a rate comparable to the amount of cash on hand. This probably resulted in few overall jobs, but richer principles in the company. Also, the companies customers had to spend time working on our quality issues rather than creating better products for the end user. Also, the companies customers had to pay our 'inflated' prices rather that using that money to upgrade their facilities.
Eventually competition came in the form of Asian manufacturers with modern equipment and processes. The company spent money trying to quickly upgrade equipment and procedures. The competition produced products of equivalent quality at about half the price. Things were no longer great for the company, but times were much better for the companies vendors and customers. Quality increased and jobs were created in the US as the company was forced to modernize the facility.
Which is to say that the free market and capitalism depends on active competitions. While there may be nothing wrong with MS maintaining a monopoly on x86 systems, it does not help the American economy. Manufacturing jobs are being lost at an alarming rate, programming jobs are being lost at an alarming rate, and MS sits there with billions of dollars in the bank and an OS that desperately needs improvement in quality. They could do it.
But there is no competition. There is no other OS that threatens their market share. The vendors are in trouble because MS had no need to upgrade their facilities. The customers are in trouble because MS does not have to charge true market value. There has been no significant feature changes in Windows or Office for at least 5 years. Yet there has also been no retail price change. Admittedly Office now contains VPC, but still we are paying $200 for VPC and $250 for a five year old office suite.
I would suggest that if competition did exist the customer would pay a lower true market price. I suggest that MS would have to hire programmer and buy equipment. I suggest that the previously unemployed programmer would have money to buy durable goods. The manufactures of the durable goods would then hire workers to create the goods. And so on.
This is certainly a simplistic economic view, but the point is that we allow companies to create monopolies and these monopolies cause nothing but problems in the free market . Money collects in unproductive spaces. Technology and process stagnate. And China and India create better cheaper products while American CEO claim ignorance and disbelief at the unfairness of it all and demand that congress enact dangerous protectionist measure to help keep American jobs. They could have just spent some of thier cash reserves on implemeting the new technology, but that never occurs to the CEO.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I believe that was the grandparent's point. A settlement this large is a de facto admission of wrongdoing, regardless of the wording of the settlement. This should be usable against them in court in the future, whether they want it to be or not. It's no longer up to them, ideally.
They are paying off a complaint because they do not feel that the legal system, which is ultimately designed to protect the innocent[0] will protect them. Ergo they must feel, on some level, that what they did is seen by the masses as wrong.
Legal boilerplate should never overrule common sense, but it does. Frequently.
[0] implementation consequences notwithstanding, that is the intent.
It really has nothing to do with what they "admit" or "feel" -- A federal court found them to be an illegally maintained monopoly, and that means cash in the bank for anyone who was competing against them.
Settling these cases gets them out of the quarterly reports and gets Wall Street to stop thinking about MS's legal problems.
Also, this settlement is jackshit. Even DR-DOS got more money.
Gee, thats such an astute observation...
Of course it is totally wrong. It is called a settlement for a reason. You settle the dispute without any more court hearings and without admitting to anything. You simply pay an amount of money you find acceptable to not have to deal with the situation anymore.
Why is it that because MS can afford $23million without blinking that they must be admiting guilt? Would it be the same if the settled for $1 million, $1000, $1? Because all of those amounts are too much for MS to simply toss out there to get things done with and over.
That said, past behavior dictates erring on the side of MS using illegal tactics to squash competition. But it still doesn't mean paying $23mil means admission of anything, other than admission that MS has at least $23 mil in the bank.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
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?
Actually what this is, is an admission by Be that they'd rather save something to pay off the investors and/or creditors rather than be economically litigated into the ground by Microsoft.
Remember folks, Microsoft's war chest is so great that it actually economically litigated the UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE into the ground, forcing the Feds and multiple individual States to "settle" for a bag of peanut shells and a waggling finger.
If you can keep a court case going by filing motion after motion, continuance after continuance, and then appeal after appeal, eventually the other party will run out of money or lose interest and go away.
Basically, during a conference call between Be's lawyers and Microsoft's lawyers, the group representing Microsoft told the group representing Be that they were prepared to spend at least 2x the remaining assets of Be to "defend themselves" and wouldn't it be in the best interests of Be to obtain *something* to return to the poor shareholders rather than see it all turn to dust with nothing in return.
You run out of money, you run out of lawyers... that's a simple and sad fact.
I've been party to such conference calls (on both sides). It's a dirty, pathetic business.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
My PowerBook didn't come with Windows. ;)
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