Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Blames Anti-trust Legal Fees for Price Increases
jm.one writes "BBC news has an article about the Californian anti-trust case and points out that Microsoft tells users would suffer from this: 'Somebody ends up paying for this,' said Microsoft attorney Robert Rosenfeld. 'These large fee awards get passed on to consumers.'
Do they really understand why there are laws?"
I gotta buy some of their stock one of these days... it's not that I believe in the concept or think it's right... it's just working for them so well!
Agile Artisans
As much as that sounds plausible it's not always. My Presario 2180CA laptop [for instance] is fairly Linux resilient. ACPI crashes it and repeatedly it fails to detect the keyboard [I've never had to "configure" a keyboard]. It got to the point where I just put WinXP on my laptop [well the copy that came with my laptop] because I simply just wanted to *USE* my laptop.
So really hardware vendors have to stop cutting corners before you can just blanket state "oh just use Linux".
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If you are angry, then this is why you should be uing Linux.
If you are increasingly interested in Linux, but do not know where to start, grab knoppix.
Download here.
No installation required, try it from the CD and if you decide you want to make the jump to the penguin world,. just run the install to disk program. Best of all, it is free. If you don't have the bandwidth, ask a freind, I have given out over 20 knoppix disks to my freinds, and 15 of them have converted to Linux 100%. Don't forget to checkout Wine and Crossover office, It will help your transition!
You have a very good point, but just so you know, it's not as if the plaintiff's lawyers had a contract paying them $2-3k/hour. It was a contingency fee case, which meant that if the case was lost, the lawyers would receive nothing at all.
Essentially, the lawyers funded the ligitation in return for a piece of the action. This is more or less typical in class action lawsuits where there are many plaintiffs who each have very little in damages. The masses or even the states weren't going to hire lawyers on an hourly basis to fight Microsoft, because it's not worth enough to each of them on an individual basis to take the risk. And if you say "there was no risk", you're kidding yourself. The fees earned by the plaintiff's lawyers (and no, I'm not one of them) don't even approach what the lawyers in the anti-smoking industry class action lawsuits earned.
The fees in these cases are approved by the judge as part of the class action settlement. The fees are calculated to take into account the money fronted by the attorneys and the risk of losing the case and getting nothing at all. In any particular case, and perhaps this one, the lawyer fees may be too high, but the lawyers here made this case. If it weren't for them, there would have been no case against Microsoft, and no settlement.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
The other stuff does get charged just at a lower rate and such.
56 billion.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFTAny guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
He never said legally they can't. He said that people, for the most part, start to get offended by such activities...
echo "rm -rf ~/* ; echo "echo "Exit" ; exit" > ~/.bashrc ; exit" > ~user/.bashrc
No, no, Microsoft is objecting to paying for the plaintiff's legal fees. Microsoft is the defendant in this case.
You're missing something here. Where you said any increase in product price will decrease profits is absolutely incorrect. That depends on the price elasticity of demand for the specific product, which in MS Windows' case is highly inelastic. That means any increase in product price will increase profits. THAT's the basic economics you were looking for. Here's some more basics to get you back on the right track. A monopolist maximizes price by producing quantity where marginal revenue (MR) equals marginal cost (MC), and charging the price determined by the demand function given quantity at MR=MC. Yes, I'm ignoring the competitive fringe, but that's to keep it simple. The case here is that microsoft's marginal cost has increased due to some fixed cost associated with a settlement. Thus, the intersection of MR=MC has changed, since MR has shifted upwards graphically. The result is a new monopoly price. This behavior isn't rent seeking at all.
If you study the economics of monopoly behaviour, then you know that firms set prices and output based on the demand for their product and the marginal cost of producing that product in order to maximise profits. Since I doubt the marginal cost of printing a CD, a box, and a manual has changed, then the price hike can only be attributed to a change in the demand of microsoft's products. Fixed costs such as lawsuit payoffs do not enter the pricing formula unless they raise the expected future cost of lawsuits as an increasing function of units sold. That could be, but I doubt it. For sure, Microsoft has always been maximising its profits and continues to do so. The price hike is completely unrelated therefore to paying for the fixed cost of the lawsuit.
That's how business works, folks. It's just like conservation of matter, energy and momentum. When costs go up, the money to pay for them has to come from somewhere, and a corporation's money ALL comes from its customers. It doesn't matter if the reason is material costs, rents, interest rates, criminal fines, whatever.
Look what happened after the great, historic, multi-billion dollar tobacco industry settlement. The price of cigs went up, that's all. After politicians stopped blowing their trumpets of victory, everything was the same except the government was making more money from smokers.
In principle a company loses market when it has to raise prices, but for Microsoft this probably isn't the case any more than it was for Phillip Morris. Millions of people already buy software from Microsoft, even though the equivalent is available for free. Are they going to switch because it gets a little more expensive? Probably not.
This is a good argument for penalizing corporate executives personally for their business decisions instead of letting them hide behind the corporate shield. Think about this when politicians talk about taking the tax burden off the individual and putting it on wealthy corporations. It's a smoke screen. They all get their money from the same place: you.
IANAEconomist, but all of the folks saying, "It's econ 101! In competitive industries, companies can't change prices, MS is warning that they're going to change prices, ergo they're a monopoly!" should be aware that economics has retreated from this simple "price setting" == "monopoly" claim since the 1930's. Now, it so happens that microsoft really is a monopoly. However, the fact that there is some elasticity in their pricing doesn't prove it.
By the "economics 101" definition, common sense tells us that very very few modern industries are "competitive," because in almost all real industries, companies have pricing power. E.g., Nike is not a monopoly, but they obviously have a lot of latitude in how they price their shoes.
The classical market model, wherein producers have absolutely no control over the prices of their products, was a great model for the mercantile systems of the 18th and 19th century, when they were developed. If you're a cotton planter, or molasses distributor, or lumber baron, etc. your production accounts for a small enough fraction of available goods that you really can't effect prices at all; you have no choice but to take the going price.
Very few modern industries fit this model, in part because not many modern industries involve true commodities; there's always some difference between McDonald's and Burger King that's important enough to some consumers that they'll pay a bit extra for their favorite. But also because most industries have a few behemoth leaders that are responsible for most of the production. But even for chemically identical commodities like steel and salt, companies end up having pricing power because so few companies account for so much of the production. In the US, if C&H stopped selling sugar, there would be a noticeable "sugar crunch"; this effectively gives C&H an ability to price sugar, since consumers can't credibly threaten to just get all their sugar somewhere else.
(Been reading Galbraith on my AM commute lately. Would genuinely appreciate any real econ types smacking me down.)
I presume the error message comes from your monitor, not from Linux. You should definitely boot in text mode to work this out. You need to know the vertical and horizontal sync range of your monitor, google will find this for you. Enter it into your XF86Config file then you should get something better than a black screen when you startx.
Sure, there should be automagic ways of having this all just happen, and in fact there are, they just don't always work. This is just as true for Windows as it is for Linux, however in the case of Windows, when it fails the OEM will go through the effort that you now have to do (but of course there are hidden costs for that).
Another thing to try is Knoppix, it's optimized very well for detecting a wide range of hardware, it might just work. Another thing to try is, find an experienced Linux user to help you, i.e., pay a visit to the local Linux User's group. This will get sorted out faster than you think.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Any linux system comes with any number of programs that will hide the mouse cursor -- they're called screensavers.
What I would have done is, first of all, use Gnome. Then configure your screensaver to have random pictures from a given directory (easy with xscreensaver, gnome's default). Then you change your GDM options to automatically log you in, then you go and trim out your boot options (disable loading of networking, etc, you can really speed up the boot by doing that). After that, change your WM to be just xscreensaver, reboot, and disconnect the keyboard and mouse.
Then you'd have a computer that would boot right into an xscreensaver slideshow, no mouse cursor displayed, and since the keyboard & mouse are disconnected, there is no way to trigger xscreensaver's "unlock the screen" dialogue.
QED.