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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."
Weren't these guys going to make it easier?
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
Or perhaps these folks are refraining because the fine print of the license for XP includes the following:
"User agrees to indemnify Microsoft against any and all abuse of the legal system and will in no case whatsoever assist any governmnent, foreign or domestic, in levying sanctions against Microsoft."
(I don't run it, but it wouldn't surprise me to see this in there.)
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
... to say that "the rest of the 'money' will go to California schools".
What will go to "California Schools" is 'boxes of Microsoft product', valued at the $-value for the settlement, by a team of accountants, lawyers, and auditors.
This settlement is a sham. It is nothing but an easy seeding program for Microsoft market-share harvests in the 6-month to 1-year time frame, among a vulnerable and naive market (education), and Microsoft know it.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Everyone knows that silly Monopoly money isn't real!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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
Well I guess the process is too long, to heavy and they have no guarantee to get anything in the end.
I guess that's why those people don't apply security patches either!
--JC
--JC
Sheez - let's see if this gets modded up ...
Note the following things:
1) The post is grammatically and syntactically deranged.
2) The post makes no attempt to justify its assertion.
3) The 'quote' is missing a word, something that's unlikely to happen if it was real, since the poster would have copy-pasted it.
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.
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
Ahem. Say what you want, Bill gates does, has, and will continue to, give vast quantites of money to charities and schools. Try reading his will sometime.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
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
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.
Yeah... sssuuuuure.... I'm gonna do that right now!
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.
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.
Confusing? discouraging? time-consuming? Oh, this refers to the claims process. I thought they were talking about Windows OS's. Silly me!
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
Last I checked, between February 18, 1995 thru December 15, 2001 you were able to buy Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4 and NT5 (Aka Windows 2000). None of which have manditory registration.
As a result, Microsoft is completely incapable of having a record of who purchased their product.
Moreover, even if they did have such a list, they don't nessicarily have a list specifying the state in which the user resides, and as this rebate only applies to users in California...
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
The altruism of the wealthy is rarely more than a tax deduction.
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.
Don't you recognize Microsoft exerts some kind of monopoly in many software markets ( OS, office suite, media player, browser, etc. ) right now ? Of course people can write better software - hell, many do :) - but having a better product doesn't mean the top rank in market share because many other variables have to be taken into account, one of the most important being the monetary assets of the companies involved, another being the political power corporations can gain to twist societal tendancies into their favor. Microsoft have massive monetary and political power to help them stay on top, which isn't fair for any startup company. I'm not saying it's impossible to topple Microsoft as a monopoly by having better products alone, but the defacto-monopoly right now is definitely not a good thing for competition, and hence for consumers.
<rant>
We do not live in a classic-capitalism utopia where companies are ethical and let competition strive ; we live in a world where giant corporations enjoy being on top to gain huge piles of money, namely because of the underlying "greed" capitalism is based on. I've always found strange that on one hand, capitalists explain their position with a greed-as-human-nature argument while on the other hand assuming that this greed will be refrained for some Common Good. Greed has never been a matter of common good, it's about gaining and preserving power. Capitalism is not concerned with morals and ethics, and that's why it cannot stand alone as a worldview. So defending Microsoft on a strictly economical dimension isn't very much relevant at all.
</rant>
And actually I think MacOS X surpasses WinXP hands down on usability, as long as you're not glued up in WinLogics as a user.
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
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
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 $3.77, or whatever paltry fractional amount would have been sent, great, at least the money is being re-pooled into a useful amount again.
i'm in line for a refund on the MS products i purchased between the dates specified, but i can't seem to find UPCs from 1995(!)
give me a break. this settlement isn't getting responses, because people don't keep receipts for software for 10 bloody years.
MS gets away with it, again.
Microsoft does NOT force anyone's hand to use their software. Even on PCs that come with it, you can get a refund
You ever tried to do that?
It's almost like those rebate programs:
1) Overprice your product and offer a rebate
2) Bank on the fact that only a small percentage of customers actually mail in for the rebate, and do so correctly.
3) Profit
So MS's business model is looking more and more like:
1) Do whatever you want and let others/the government file antitrust suits.
2) Settle suits knowing almost nothing will be done to enforce/cash in on them
3) Profit
If Dubya wants to convince the public that the US economy is getting better, he should just designate litigation settlement income as a business sector instead of trying to classify burger flippers as "manufacturing jobs".
=Smidge=
Even though I would like to see M$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.
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.
If it's in his will, I don't think he'll get much of a tax benefit from it ;-)
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
and/or a silly mascot that people will remember.
Good idea! Hmm, let me think... maybe an animal of some sort. A tiger? A sealion?
GOT IT. A penguin.
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.
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 $5-700,000.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
Ahem... RedHat has a good bit of money, enough for maybe one big ad campaign, and SUSE is owned by Novell, who has some serious change, and has IBM support. IBM can pull off huge campaigns like this financially, they just need to make it better for the Average Joe (which IBM's not willing to do - they've said many times that Linux isn't ready for the desktop).
<conspiracy>They can print software and donate it. I don't know how the accountants sort out the value of the donation though. If it is anything other than cost of production (not estimated costs based on R&D, or wholesale/retail prices etc), then MS has a license to print money and expand their market through tax writeoffs.</conspiracy>
1) buy M$ stock /. comment suggesting others do the same
2) post a
3) profit
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
Wow, It's not that hard to file. I got maybe 4 forms sent to me already in the mail. I thought the deadline was long ago (mid-March), but it seems to have been extended to April 28.
As long as you are filing for less than $100 reimbursement, you do not need to provide any product keys or proof. You just have to provide a list of what you bought, and most consumers will easily fall within the $100 limit and qualify for the standard (easy) form.
In other words, fill out a form saying "I bought Windows 98 on or about this date" and you get a voucher.
That's it. No proof necessary if your filing is under $100 and fewer than 5 products purchased. So get your forms, because time is running out! Go to the web site and request a standard claim form now.
California Schools all ready get free copies of Windows 2000 for donated computer equipemnt. As long as the equipment is less than a Pentium III and better than a Pentium 1. (Which is a fine computer for learning how to type on.)
They also get deep discounts for Microsoft products. That's why none of the schools were elegible for this refund. They pay (approx) $45 for a full version of Microsoft Office 2003 Pro. And $52 for a full copy of Windows XP...
What more can Microsoft do for the schools, that isn't all ready amazing?!
How could you? They don't give you Windows refunds anymore. You have to send back the entire system.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
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!
It's because to get the claim, you must have your windows 95 or 98 sales receipt, and cd key. It doesn't apply to windows XP. Who in the heck still has a sales receipt for windows 95?
Scott
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.
Which doesn't run on linux. Which means I'll have to go out, buy Windows and download Adobe Acrobat 6.0.
Bastards! They got me everwhere I turn!
I filed my claim in December and have yet to receive anything.
in bed.
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.
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.