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Microsoft Settles Iowa Antitrust Case
ForestRangerBob writes "Comes v. Microsoft is over after Microsoft agreed to a settlement. The class action lawsuit alleged that Iowa consumers had been overcharged for Microsoft products for a decade owing to Microsoft's monopoly of the market. Predictably, the lawyers are about to get a big payday and 'the software giant will certainly be on the hook for millions of dollars, some of which may end up helping Iowa school kids. Average consumers will probably end up with a few bucks or a coupon for a free operating system upgrade, but the real winners will no doubt be the lawyers — the team prosecuting the case has already earned $60 million in legal fees from a 2004 case in Minnesota that charged Microsoft with similar offenses.'"
When I first tried to read the comments, I got /.'s familiar "nothing to see here..." message, which also describes the site that hosted the documents from the Iowa case. Going to the site hosting the documents now results in a login request.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Demanding $60 million from Microsoft is like Dr. Evil demanding ONE MILLION DOLLARS from the World's Leaders today. Bill Gates could probably find that much money just by scrounging around in the various couches in his mansion. That provides no incentive for the company to change its behavior. No... if you want them to take notice you need to ding them for THIRTY THREE BILLION DOLLARS! Mua ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaa!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is only a bit more of a punishment than the fine from the EU of a couple ten thousand dollars a day.
And what else do they have to give out? More Microsoft products! Either a voucher, or software for schools. And from that comes support contracts, future upgrades, additional add-ons, all which will cost the schools and/or users additional money.
Why do courts and defendants even allow this? If I cut myself with a razor because it was used shoddy construction and a blade wasn't secured properly, and sue the company, why would I want another razor from them? I may get the razor free, but I still wind up having to buy blades for it later.
Granted, they aren't saying they don't want Windows, just that they were overcharged, but this still seems ludicrous.
So when do we start the law suits against the lawyers who screw the average guy by filing lawsuits on their behalf and then making all the profits and getting us coupons? Seems like a lawsuit that the jury couldn't help but award to us.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Microsoft cannot begin to dream of reaching the level of evil that lawyers as a group have attained. You think the cost of having a Microsoft monopoly is high? Lawyers and legal organizations increase the cost of every single thing you ever bought in your life, from penny candy to auto insurance. They take a portion of every bit of money that changes hands for legal reasons, they siphon money off of broken families and child support settlements, and from birth death they get their cut every step of the way.
Well duh.. even the losing side's laywers get paid well.
The problem is that MS is a little upset that it cost them some of their beloved cash, but they shake it off and think of this as the cost of doing business. They are like everyone else, they don't want to pay for utilities, taxes, or whatever, but its just the cost of doing what you do.
What I want is a real judgement or change from these cases, not a glorified parking ticket. What is going to change from this? Nada.
What is microsoft a monopoly on? A poorly implemented, poorly documented, closed source, closed API "standard" operating system where the only people who know the standard is MS.
From what I understand, cifs was opened up (don't know the details here, but that is what I understand), but that is only the tip of the iceburg of MS's embrace and extend vendor lockin thing.
UNIX/Linux has POSIX, IEEE specs, open source, rfcs, and all this. Heck, Microsoft had its own version of UNIX back in the day, and it was pretty decent. But the fact is that we don't want BSODs, we don't want viruses, we don't want to be yelled at by paperclips, we don't want to have the tray yell at us or telling us we have too many icons on our desktop, we don't want crappy browsers pushed on us, we don't want 99% of what MS gives us, we want something that runs our applications on our hardware, and something that "just works".
I say its time for MS to be forced to publish their "standards" and APIs.
We desperately need this up on bittorrent. Please do it if you can or ask for help if you can't.
I say its time for MS to be forced to publish their "standards" and APIs.
I disagree. I think that Microsoft has to be stopped from using anti-competitive tactics in their way of doing business and the rest will take care of itself. Let them keep their junk, closed source, buggy operating system.
I say one set of prices for EVERYONE published publicly with no contract tie-ins to any other MS or competing product coming into the equation will take care of everything!
And you know, I think part of the reason that it is so hard to find computers with alternate operating systems have more to do with the producers of those operating systems.
Nope. Thanks for trying, though.
I'm sure Dell would love to sell computers with the MacOS, problem is Apple doesn't let them.
Because Apple doesn't want to out of frikkin business, that's why. Dell had plenty of time to sell computers with BeOS and Red Hat, who would be quite happy to sell through Dell.
If there was a huge demand for *nix OS's, then the OEMs that make them (yes, they do exist) would see an increase in sales, and by the laws of supply and demand, more companies would work to incorporate those sales. However, the demand is not there, thus there is no increase in sales, thus most companies will not bother to sell those computers.
No consumer demands Windows. Consumers demand platforms for their applications. And where are the most applications? The Win32 api. So where do consumers go? Windows. And since most consumers run windows, what api do most software companies develop for? Windows. A real anti-trust settlement would have broken up Microsoft into separate companies and force them to open their api's.
I don't think this will happen, however, do to the fact that gaming is on the rise as far as standard uses of a computer, and macs are no good for games, thus the jokes regarding the lack of existence of 'mac gamers'.
"Not as good" does not mean "no good". Besides, this reinforces the monopoly argument: if DirectX and Win32 were forced open, Linux vendors and Apple could run games just fine on their systems without modification.
Yes I know all you /.ers are gonna bash me for this, but quit acting like MS is the only corporation that buys market share. Do you think automobiles still run on gasoline because car makers think it is a good idea? No, they run on gasoline b/c Exxon/Mobil has paid for them to run on gasoline. Do you think Gov. Perry (Texas) passed a law that requires all pre-adolescent girls to get vaccinated against an STD b/c he thinks it is in their best interest? No, he passed the law b/c Merck gave him a s**t load of money. I know its fun to bash MS b/c they throw sacks of money around to stay at the top of the market, but there are hundreds of companies that do it, and thousands that would if they had the money.
02/13/2006 FUNDS RECEIVED *type: *DEPOSIT $251.00
$251.00 is serious money from Microsoft Corp, NOT "Average consumers will probably end up with a few bucks or a coupon".
Wouldn't it be nice if the judge could rule that the public good would be best served by seeing the case through, and did indeed ruled so in this case?