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Few Takers For Microsoft's Settlement Cash
Makarand writes "According to this article on SiliconValley.com very few claims have been received
to claim money from a Microsoft
antitrust settlement in California. Only about
4% of the estimated 14 million eligible California consumers have bothered to file a claim till now.
The deadline for filing claims is officially April 28 but is likely to be pushed back into May or June.
Either, consumers have found the claims process too confusing, time-consuming and discouraging
to keep them from making a claim or they are waiting till the last minute to file(like taxes).
According to the settlement one-third of the unclaimed money will be kept by Microsoft and the rest
will be given to Californian schools."
What's the point of filing a claim when we can't do so easily on the web to receive a free Lindows PC?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Indeed, and a market depends on *choice*. The problem with MS is that they have crush... prevented other companies from getting into the PC market for so long, that the only viable way to create competitor OSes is to either market your own hardware with it (Apple) or make it *free*.
But what is the SIGnificance?
First would be ignorance. I would imagine that a majority of the people who qualify for this settlement do not know about it and it's not as if Microsoft is going to go out of its way to inform them.
Second would be reality. To claim your settlement money you must produce your "Product Key number or Product ID number". Mind you these are your keys/ids from February 18, 1995 thru December 15, 2001. I don't know about you but those keys are long gone for me.
Third is human behavior. Corporations have known for a very long time that rebates are a fantastic sales tool precisely because many people do not follow through and claim them. I have a strong suspicion that the same principal is at work here - be it laziness or something else.
"If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit." - Mitch Hedberg
consumers have found the claims process too confusing, time-consuming and discouraging to keep them from making a claim
Well, DUH!
Does anyone really think Redmond is just going to happily dispose of their $$$ and make it easy to do so at the same time?
They didn't get to where they are now through stupidity.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Yeah... sssuuuuure.... I'm gonna do that right now!
Maybe people value their time more than vouchers? Seriously, how many mothers and fathers are going to take an hour out of a busy day (that they could be spending with their kids) to fill in paperwork to get some rebate on software if they decide to upgrade their system in the future?
Fact is most families don't care if their box isn't secure, patched or running the latest media player 9.03848.8464a - They'll use it once or twice a week to mail grandma.
Sorry Slashdotters, but people who upgrade enough to care about some freebie settlement vouchers ARE that current 14% of settlement takers.
The altruism of the wealthy is rarely more than a tax deduction.
I've said it before: if I rob a bank, and get away with the largest haul of any bank robbery in history, and rather than keeping all of my ill-gotten gains, I give away some small but meaningful portion of it to charity, and the recipients of my generosity are profoundly grateful for my gift ...
... I'm still a bank robber.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
most people have never heard of Linux, and most those that have think that it is a software package that you load on a Windows server. The reason people will pay $300 for Windows is because that's all they know. Samething when it comes to CPUs, I hear way too often that all someone wants when getting a new computer is a 'Pentium'. You mention AMD and they look all puzzled and say 'is that a Pentium?'
It's all about advertising, which Linux get's very little of. And the advertising it does get is very generic and not very specific. Those that know Linux think it's a product of IBM or a new way of running servers. If Red Hat or SUSE or Mandrake ran ads every 5 minutes on 'Must See TV' people would notice, but this isn't going to happen soon because that costs A LOT of money...money which none of these companies have.
That and they need a jingle that will stick in peoples heads for years and/or a silly mascot that people will remember.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Microsoft does NOT force anyone's hand to use their software. Even on PCs that come with it, you can get a refund
You ever tried to do that?
Except that MaxOS X ties you down to their hardware almost exclusively. Weren't we talking about monopolies?
No of course we don't live in a utopia of any sort, and yes Microsoft has a lot of money. This does not make them automatically bad, and at one point they were also a small company.
They make good software.
they don't know that other OSes exist.
Actually, I'm thinking that they just don't give a rat's ass. Non-geeks that I know couldn't care less about the OS they're running. It just doesn't matter.
I didn't bother to fill out the form they sent me because I don't agree with the settlement and in fact think that it sets a very bad precedence. I purchased Microsoft software because it performed a task or service that I was willing to pay for. At no point was I tricked or forced to buy the stuff. I agreed to the price when I paid for it, so I think it would be wrong for me to change my mind years after the fact. I paid more for Autodesk, Novell and Sun software but you don't see anyone demanding rebates from them. This whole thing just struck me as a bunch of greedy layers and consumers who saw an opportunity to get something for nothing.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It's possible that people feel that if they're lazy, the money will just go to the schools anyway, so why bother?
Personally, I work for a California school system, and I figure if I don't claim it, I'll end up seeing (most of) it when it comes back to us and I can purchase needed supplies (and yes, you'll just have to deal with the fact that in general, schools are now primarily Windows-based, and more likely than not, we're going to pick up a few Windows licenses with that money).
Sig!
Seems everyone is saying that it's too time consuming or confusing - but maybe, just maybe, no one really cares.
Ahem... RedHat has a good bit of money, enough for maybe one big ad campaign, and SUSE is owned by Novell, who has some serious change, and has IBM support. IBM can pull off huge campaigns like this financially, they just need to make it better for the Average Joe (which IBM's not willing to do - they've said many times that Linux isn't ready for the desktop).
<conspiracy>They can print software and donate it. I don't know how the accountants sort out the value of the donation though. If it is anything other than cost of production (not estimated costs based on R&D, or wholesale/retail prices etc), then MS has a license to print money and expand their market through tax writeoffs.</conspiracy>
...it's people who realize that the rampant abuse of class action lawsuits by greedy lawyers is a far bigger problem than what MS does to its competition. Think big picture, not "OMG WINBLOW$ iS TEH SUXORS!"
We got it here in Florida too, and I did not accept the money as I don't want to agree not to sue MS.
One of the stipulations accepting the money is not to sue MS.
Besides the pultry few dollars are not worth the hassle. The latter no doubt lies behind what is going on in California. The state settled, not it's constituants.
But the profit Microsoft makes on Windows is something like 80%. So, they donate $1 million, the real cost to them $200,000 but they save at least $300,000 on their tax bill. Net gain of at least $100,000!
Microsoft's school marketing program is about as altruistic as Phillip Morris putting low cost cigarette vending machines in high schools.
It's demoralizing to see Microsoft drag out every anti-trust case, and when they're finally found guilty, and all appeals are eventually exhausted, weasel and squirm their way into a "settlement" that amounts to little more than marketing.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
...in a mix of donated Microsoft software and cash grants ..
Well I am sure its true, because 99.9999% software (full retail) and 0.0001% Cash (A five that fell in to the crate of MS Bob that no-one wants to risk reaching into)
Is still a Mix....
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
The Mac is a good option too. I pointed my brother in that direction several years ago and he hasn't needed any support from me since then.
For anyone willing to change, and it's not that hard, they get the free hardware and software support they are accustomed to getting from me. But I'm not wasting any more time removing worms, reinstalling Windows every year when registry rot requires it, or cleaning up spyware. After a short period, I'm saving time, and so is the user.
For now, I'm not trying to convert people who still need a lot of Windows-specific apps. They're phase II. But for most people, I'm now happy recommending Linux, and it's sufficiently mature that most people are happy using it. We've reached that important knee of the curve.
Most naive users are surprised that they no longer have daily crashes, Outlook worms, etc. And they like the price, too. I think most non-geeks would be demanding a nice GUI Linux, but they simply didn't know that option existed.
Microsoft is huge, mostly because in the DOS days PHBs made the purchasing decisions, and we know how technically astute they can be. The Microsoft monopoly is a market based problem, and there is a market based solution. If you don't like it, don't support it. Change the PC marketplace, one PC at a time.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
My ignorance of legal jargon notwithstanding, MS didn't exactly "win" the case, though. My point stands: people are complaining that the settlement was unduly lenient, and that even that settlement is being effectively side-stepped by rebates and vouchers.
This is where the serious fun begins.
The altruism of the wealthy is rarely more than a tax deduction.
Let me help you out. What you really mean to say is "Rich people are all fucking bastards. They should all die slow painful deaths. Even the ones that donate HUGE sums of money to charities."
Be happy. Nothing else matters.
"What isn't claimed goes to the kids (or 2/3 of it). If I took the 100 bucks I'd just buy more stuff. I think the schools could do a lot more with that portion"
No money for schools, just Microsoft software. Microsoft keeps *all* the unclaimed money. They just have to give software that *retails* at prices totalling 2/3 of the amount. Note that MS Windows retails at $200 but is available for about $50 to Dell, etc. Further, since computers come with an OS, this means that they will have to buy other Microsoft software that they don't really need and might never use (like my high school's Fortran compiler; I think that the two of us in the Fortran/COBOL class did manage to compile Hello World eventually but that was the end of it).
If the judge hadn't thrown out the Lindows.com offer, then other distros (and Apple, charities, etc.) could have followed suit. Microsoft might have had to pay in something that would have actually mattered.