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Microsoft Settles Minnesota Antitrust Suit
An anonymous reader writes "According to the Star Tribune: 'The Microsoft antitrust suit in Minnesota was settled out-of-court Monday seven weeks after it began, but before the plaintiffs even finished putting on their case before the jury. Terms of the settlement won't be disclosed until they are finalized and presented to a Hennepin County judge for preliminary approval 'in early summer,' Microsoft said in a statement. The antitrust suit in Hennepin Country District Court sought as much as half a billion dollars from Microsoft for alleged overcharges of more than 1 million Minnesota consumers and businesses who bought Microsoft Windows, Word or Excel software between 1994 and 2001.'"
What is Minnesota running out of money just like the EU? So they try to hit up the cash cow, I think we will see more and more of these suits comming out, and all that it is going to do is make it so generic that they will get thrown out on the spot.
Or else Minnesota may have sent Brock Lesnar and Jesse Ventura after them. They could easily beat Gates and Ballmer in a tag match.
Just throw money at every piece of litigation they are in? Are they trying to artificially boost their public perception by being in as little lawsuits as possible?
....move along....nothing to see here....
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- Jax
Score one for the little guy? I doubt it.
MS should have been broken up like Ma Bell a long time ago.
Microsoft are like that car company (Ford???) who decided it was cheaper to compensate burn sufferers and the bereaved than fix the gaping flaw that made their fuel tanks tend to catch fire.
Microsoft can pay fines out of their petty cash, while perpetrating similar tricks over and over.
#define struct union
"Free" copies of WindowsXP? "Free" copies of MS-Word? a $4 coupon off your next purchase of $600 software? MS is just extending their monopoly, probably dangling a carrot in front of the schools, after all, who can fault them if its 'for the kids' ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Could be the state got overcharged, but there are enough other cases where it works the way I interpreted this one to ask anyway.
If so, I can see why M$ would settle.
A win against them in court by the state would make it a lot easier for a class-action suit to also win, setting even further precedent in other states.
Also a fellow Minnesotan (and proud to be one), I can see why they chose to settle the suit. It may not have helped the little guy, but given Microsoft more or less got off from the Federal Government, chances of this suit succeeding are very slim. Also - MS has been paying out CASH for quite a few of it's settlements - from the article "Microsoft previously paid $1.55 billion to settle similar suits in nine other states and the District of Columbia."
Hopefully this will result in that type of settlement and not the "free educational software" [which is ironic as the suit is because Microsoft was a monopoly - letting them put their software in schools only increases the monopoly].
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
This leaves us with 24 more states that have not come to any decision or have not gone after Microsoft.
Minnesota's citizens were overcharged between $10 to $70 a year. 9.7 million licenses were overcharged from 1994 to 2001. Silicon Valley
Microsoft attorneys said the company had done nothing wrong...
Then why settle even before the plaintiffs even finished putting on their case before the jury?
Could it be the case was compelling?
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There was other software available. The desktop users may have not wanted to try and learn new/other software or had an IT dept. that was willing to administer multiple party apps., point being that we should learn to live with our decisions instead of suing over them... Something to think about.
Yep, i agree. Will someone please address this issue? i know we live in a time when a law suit is both a legit way to "right a wrong" and a way to intimidate, hush, or exact financial ruin upon someone.
How long will MS keep paying what looks to be hush money to make problems go away before someone notices that they are not chaging?
That is, of course, only one issue...i'm worried about what nberardi is worried about: at what point will legit suits against MS get tossed out because it looks/smells like another "let's hit MS's deep pockets" suit?
Microsoft will give Minnesota 700,000 copies of Microsoft Bob.
Actually, most settlement agreements have a disclaimer of liability (not guilt, this wasn't a criminal trial). If this had gone to the jury and an actual verdict been issued, then the court may have had the ability to set up a situation where further improper conduct on MSFT's part would have resulted in contemp citations.
Yet another reason why MSFT benefits from settling.
--AC
Supposedly this was Gates rejoinder to Steve Jobs when the latter said, "We're better than you." Gates knows in this case that throwing a bit of cash to Minnesota to settle the suit doesn't really matter, either. It's the same Machiavellian insight as to what it takes to win his grand strategic goals at the cost of a few tactical losses. "Oh, I over charged you for the years between 1994 and 2001? So sorry. Here's a 30% refund in 2004. Thanks for the 70% I get to keep! (And the time I needed to eliminate my competition, hehe...)".
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Where settlement, read 'Microsoft agrees to give away some of its products (which it will claim are worth a total of severl billion dollars when really its plastic and amounts to potential lost sales) to schools where it hopes to lock in students at an early age (i.e those lost sales are actually an investment at Microsofts advantage).' - for example whats better: give 10,000 copies of office to schools as part of a settlement, or give 10,000 copies of OpenOffice (essentially identical) to schools and Microsoft can give a sum of money to someone else?
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I don't know about anyone else but I still have not received my CA settlement money. Paper work I sent in almost six months ago has not produced a check. I guess we have to bring up a lawsuit to get then to pay the money they already own us from the previous law suit.