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Microsoft To Pay IBM In Antitrust Settlement
Pankaj Arora writes "A settlement has been reached in IBM's private antitrust case against Microsoft. According to the terms of the settlement, Microsoft will pay IBM $775 million cash in addition to $75 million in credit. From the article, 'The settlement resolves all discriminatory pricing and overcharging claims stemming from the U.S. government's mid-1990s antitrust case against Microsoft, the companies said in a statement. The settlement also resolves most other IBM antitrust claims, including those related to its OS/2 operating system and SmartSuite products. IBM's claims of harm to its server hardware and server software businesses are not covered by the settlement, however.'"
At $11.24B/year, they make that much in a single month.
With SmartSuite out of the way, their Office package is the basically the only commercial offering out there. Microsoft's predatory, monopolistic practices easily made the company $850 million this year, and they've been doing it for a lot of years.
Some days, my faith in the system is tested.
sigs, as if you care.
"IBM's been in a much less delicate position with Microsoft"
That would be putting in mildy.
With IBM dumping Lenovo, they have effectively purged a cancerous Microsoft division residing withing IBM itself.
Hopefully we will see this start to happen on smaller scales across the business computing world where many companies effectively have their IT department acting as an extension of Microsoft.
I believe one facet of this case was Microsoft's intentional breaking of Win 3.1 under Dr. DOS, which had a decent marketshare and better product at the time. They wouldn't be out-designed so they decided to play the bully. Like a kid who wants something so bad he takes it when no one is looking.
Good for IBM, though the market has still not recovered - but yet we've got these goons in Washington taking fat checks to keep the monopoly going strong. This is no small problem, and it is only going to get worst without some corrective action from congress.
Does the resolution of the OS/2 dispute mean that IBM is free to release OS/2 under a GPL license without fear of M$oft legal action ?
...hahahahahaha!
:( I don't think that pain is ever going to go away (even though it *is* soothed somewhat by the niceness and comfort of OS-X these days).
hahahahahahaha!
hahahahahaha!
hahahahahahaha!
hahahahahaha!
hahahahahahaha!
Aaaa-hahahahahaaaa...
Aaaaaaa-hahahahahaaaaahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa....
Oh well. I guess it's great for IBM that they got paid, but what about the pain of all the BSOD's that we poor users had to contend with for - oh - a decade or so, where we could instead have been using a properly multitasking, threaded and memory protected OS.
If IBM considers $775M adequate compensation, then the $75M MS credit is irrelevant. They don't have to use it, and can choose not to.
If they want to take a poke at MS, though, they could set up an amnesty program, such that when any company is being muscled by the BSA, funds from the $75M are used to bring that company into compliance for past use, possibly in exchange for adopting IBM software in the future.