Microsoft Drags Feet with Settlement Claims

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft is holding up compensation claims from a quarter of million Californians in order to punish Lindows.com, and to coerce the class action plaintiffs 'into siding with Microsoft against its Lindows competitor,' according to a court filing seen by The Register. The document, filed on 21st November by Townsend and Townsend and Crew, lead counsel for the Californian class action consumers, points out that none of the claims being held up was actually filed via Lindows.com, yet Microsoft has held them 'hostage' for over two months."

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[SmallFurryCreature]

Ah, such fresh faced innocence. I bet you read the headline. The post AND the articles linked in the post. So naive. Real /. Trolls scan the headline, notice a few words as they scroll down for the reply button and then post their "thoughts" without previewing. You yet got much to learn.

Yes of course you are absolutly right. The post and articles point out clearly that the claims being held back have nothing to do with the lindows. These claims have been made by ordinary citizens of California and should have been handled.

As for why MS is doing this. Bill Gates is a little kid. For the last 20 years he has been head of an empire growing ever bigger. Everyone around him told him he was a hero. Now slowly he is finding out that outside his little empire people really don't share his vision of the world. Law makers are after him, geeks are building software for FREE, major companies he thought he had beaten multiple times are still there ready to see him fail.

I am willing to bet that nobody on this earth will be able to get Bill Gates to admit that this is a just punishment, that he Bill Gates was guilty and that this settlement is exactly what MS deserved. To all the MS apologists. Proof me wrong.

Re:hmm, is this really that big of a shock?

[JayBlalock]

Um, they were fairly law-abiding until they decided to overthrow IBM and DOS \ OS/2. Of course, at that point, they were only a small software shop best-known for putting out a really great Flight Simulator. (and a pretty good word processor)

That's what drives me batty about our current system. Ultimately, the Best Product pretty much cannot win. Whichever company has the slickest marketing and the most underhanded back-room tactics wins. And that's almost never the guy with the best product since he will assume he can win through market pressures.

While it certainly wasn't a perfect operating system, just imagine what the last decade of computing would've been like had OS/2 become the standard instead of Windows...