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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.'"
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....
PC World
Forbes
FT.com (A good one!)
- 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.
Seems like a bit of a stretch for a lawsuit to me. However, it must have gotten someone at Microsoft scared, else they wouldn't have settled it.
What is Minnesota running out of money just like the EU? So they try to hit up the cash cow...
Well, MN is running out of money, but that isn't what this is about.
MN was one of the original states in the anti-trust lawsuit. When the other states settled, we didn't.
It just took this long to pan out.
-mls
It is usually cheaper to settle out of court than put this in the public domain. Look at what happened to OJ for instance, he was found guilty, but everybody thinks he is guilty except in the eyes of the law. Microsoft doesn't care what the law thinks of them, they care what their customers think of them, and that is why it is always cheaper to settle, and not set a president.
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?
Opera Watch - An Opera browser blog.
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.
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
Won a big settlement, most of which went into the pockets of Mike Cerici
He and his buds only got about $250 million. (chump change) The state got $7 - $8 billion.
What I loved about the results of that case was that when the public found out how much money ($250 million) that one little lawyers firm got a lot of people were pretty upset. But our friendly attorney general said that amount was "fair" (I'll give you one guess as to what political party he's affiliated with). I wonder how jealous the state's lawyers were when they saw the millions of dollars that Mr Cerici and his buds got in comparison to their public (albeit still good) wages.
Casual Games/Downloads
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.