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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."
i think that Bill Gates deserves every penny he's made over the years. but still even if the people don't claim their money 2/3 still go to the school system. better spent there i guess. does anybody happen to know how much money microsoft had donated to various schools over the years? im just curious
There is another way: make a better OS. That may be the best way since Linux is free and yet only has 5% market share. If you have a choice between $250 and free and you still choose to pay then maybe there's something wrong with the free choice.
Microsoft is a public company. With millions of shareholders. That is, millions of owners. You want to own a piece of it yourself, and have voting rights regarding the company's future? Go buy a block of stock.
/. dominated by so much misplaced anger.
I know I'll probably get modded down and get all kinds of bad karma for this, but I hate to see
Microsoft is not just Gates and Balmer. It is a voice for a large number of people. It's this voice that gives Microsoft the power it has.
M$ Makes every one who buys their software register it which means they have a record of who purchased it. Therefore M$ should have to contact everyone with a claim form that merely requires you to properly identify yourself. I work in medical electronics and if we did things the way M$ does we'd be shut down in a heartbeat.
You can legislate morally you can't legislate morality
Or maybe you don't realised that you've got a choice?
A lot of people who buy computers just go to PC World (or wherever) who only supply machines preinstalled with Windows, and they don't know that other OSes exist.
And most people who do own PCs don't know you can get a refund on your pre-installed copy of Windows if you don't use it, either.
If something could actually match Windows in terms of usability, it would create big waves.
OS X, Microsoft does work to force people to buy MS products, or do you think that keeping the Office formats a moving target since 95 was just a game the dev team played 'cause they were bored, or binding IE so tight to the OS that it cannot be removed without killing critical parts like windows update.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I filed through Lindows, but a judge through it out. I'm refiling and when I get my vouchers, I'm sending them to LIndows. Just my way of helping Microsoft to help the Linux community.
I don't believe class-action lawsuits truly benefit anyone except the lawyers, who are the only ones that will receive any useful prize from the settlement. So let them get their money from Microsoft without my help, and if California schools get my $3.77, or whatever paltry fractional amount would have been sent, great, at least the money is being re-pooled into a useful amount again.
i'm in line for a refund on the MS products i purchased between the dates specified, but i can't seem to find UPCs from 1995(!)
give me a break. this settlement isn't getting responses, because people don't keep receipts for software for 10 bloody years.
MS gets away with it, again.
It's almost like those rebate programs:
1) Overprice your product and offer a rebate
2) Bank on the fact that only a small percentage of customers actually mail in for the rebate, and do so correctly.
3) Profit
So MS's business model is looking more and more like:
1) Do whatever you want and let others/the government file antitrust suits.
2) Settle suits knowing almost nothing will be done to enforce/cash in on them
3) Profit
If Dubya wants to convince the public that the US economy is getting better, he should just designate litigation settlement income as a business sector instead of trying to classify burger flippers as "manufacturing jobs".
=Smidge=
Even though I would like to see M$ft hurt in the purse, I am one of those who has NOT yet filed. I made 3 or 4 attempts to consolodate my 'evidence' of purchases, but at the expected payout rate, I realized long ago it was going to be way more cost effective (for me) to just return the pre-filled certificates. I know they do not reflect my actual purchases, and I am SURE I have more of the little holograms about than M$ft would EVER know about. It is simply a case where the Lawyers have made the hoops too difficult to jump through.
In my defense. IANAL. I do NOT play one in the computer store. I used to assemble all my machines from parts. When I had a friend who needed an OS from M$ft, I would direct them to the university bookstore where software could be gotten at 'rational' prices. These are folks who just need a box to get by. They are WAY less interested in the politics behind a purchase they made years ago than I. I take my consolation in the fact that I have done my best to minimize the up-front money M$ft got from us in the first place.
Bottom Line. Apologies to all those who deserve to have M$ft paying through the nose, but I'm not the one who can spend the time to figure out how to make it happen.
Companies bet on very few, if any, people actually getting money out of these things. I wouldn't be surprised if the beancounters calculated it out in advance to be 5% or so. There are so many hoops to jump through, and they are so high, that few people get through the maze of red tape. Why would any company make it easy for someone to suck "free money" in the form of a rebate or voucher away from them? Best to make it as complex and as hopelessly complex as possible.
Normally I shun litigation as a solution to problems, but I think this area is a place where we could use some regulation. Things are so bad with rebates now that I wouldn't be surprised if cans of Tuna had rebates on them in the future, but cost $5 with $4 rebate. I know this is a little offtopic and Microsoft's situation is a little different, but their method of doling out their required settlement should be decided by someone with more common sense, not someone who wants to save the company the most money. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft actually pays out less than 5% of what they actually owe the people.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Bah, you only get out of paying tax on the amount you donated. So if you donate $1 million, you'll only save $3-500,000 on your taxes. It's still a net donation of $5-700,000.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
Never said Apple was a great company mate, I was just talking about usability here :) I do acknowledge Apple's lock-in problems too, don't worry.
I do not tend to think in good-bad, white-black contrasts : I do not think that Microsoft is The Devil and that a nuke on Redmond would make everlasting universal love spring out, but their monopolistic games are definitely quite a nuisance ; I'm not a zealot. It's not a matter of product quality to me as a matter of positioning in the IT world ; as pioneers Microsoft had the advantage of having much much less competition than there is now. I know it was a matter of innovation, but innovation at that time was much less threatened by other nuisances like silly patents and other DMCA-like laws... Comparing an IT startup in the mid-70s to one started in 2004 is really comparing apples to oranges.
For me this issue is beyond Good and Evil, it's a matter of power leverage. Microsoft is abusing its position as #1 software vendor all over the world and it's a problem that needs to be addressed and solved ASAP.
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
Long-EZ : "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.
l e.jhtml?articleID=18901660&pgno=3at
:" But remember, even Windows 95--nine-year old software, reviled in the Linux community as junk code--handled the exact same sound system perfectly. So did Win98, WinMe, Win2000, Win XP Home and Win XP Pro. In this case, reflexively blaming the hardware is simply a dodge. If Linux is a truly superior operating system, shouldn't it be able to do what a nine-year-old copy of Windows can do? Why is it still struggling with a problem that Microsoft solved roughly a decade ago?
Most naive users are surprised that they no longer have daily crashes, Outlook worms, etc."
Another Linux ostrich continues to live in dreamland and refuses to face reality.
1. For the first three conths of this year, Linux had up to THREE TIMES any security holes as Windows, and that is despite the fact that there are at least 100 times as many Windows computers out there as Linux computers. Just imagining how much chaos there will be if Linux had even 10% of the market.Welcome to Nightmare on Linux Street.
2. Just let an ordinary consumer try and configure Linux on a normal white box PC and see what hell really is like. Go read this terryfing experince with Linux installation at Information Week at:http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArtic
Extracts
All this is amplified now that some companies in the Linux community are charging Microsoft-level prices. When a free or low-cost distribution falls short in some area, one might shrug it off. But when a full-price Linux distribution fails to provide even Win95's levels of compatibility, and then offers poor tech support as well, Linux is hardly a bargain.
And the costs are actually worse than that: I've invested more than two full working days on just the sound problem, which has raised the real cost of Linux on this PC, so far, from its retail $90 to $90 PLUS two day's pay. That makes this install of Linux the most expensive operating system I've ever tried. (And after all that, and after trying everything that the XYZ paid tech support suggested, it's still not working right.)
I also see I'm not the only one starting to do the math, as this survey of 1,000 IT managers shows. According to that survey, it can cost three to four times as much as moving from one version of Windows to another"
Linux can't even compete withthe 9 year old Windows 95 on ease of installation and configuration.
So much for your scream about Linux being "sufficiently mature that most people are happy using it. We've reached that important knee of the curve."
In your dreams perhaps. This happens to be real life, boy!