I've been curious as to why Mac users would be anti Microsoft. I am not
as proficient in the use of a Mac or a PC as most of you. I became a fan
of Apple due to its seeming ease of operation. If I was a PC user, I'd
be pleased that I could purchase more software at a more reasonable cost
over the Mac software availability and cost. I only wish that Apple was
as big as Microsoft. I ran into the below article and was interesting to
me. If not you, I apologize. Bernard Griffis
Wall Street Journal
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REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Another Pound of Microsoft
The trial lawyers haven't yet gotten their
fill.
Wednesday, January 16, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
In a perfect world, Microsoft's antitrust
headaches
would have ended in November when it
settled with
the Justice Department. But a perfect world
wouldn't
have nine state attorneys general who still
object to
the deal and plaintiffs' lawyers whose main
job is to
shoot the wounded.
Such imperfection is why we are today faced
with
yet another strange Microsoft settlement.
This one
is over the more than 100 class-action
lawsuits
filed by consumers who claim Microsoft's
"monopolistic" pricing policies meant they
were
overcharged for Windows software.
Reasonable people might wonder how
Microsoft
could be guilty both of undercutting
competitors'
prices (a government claim) and charging
consumers too much. But if the only goal
here is
for class-action attorneys to exact their
own pound
of flesh, the claims make perfect sense.
Microsoft agreed to settle the lot by
donating more
than $1 billion in cash, software, computer
equipment and support to 14,000
impoverished
schools; as the opposing attorneys put it,
this
provided a "social benefit." This latest
humbling
was under way when Apple Computer
complained
that the deal was anticompetitive. U.S.
District
Judge Frederick Motz agreed and last week
quashed the settlement--though holding out
hope
it might be revived at a higher price.
What a spectacle. It's understandable that
Microsoft wants to end years of litigation and get on with life as a
software company. But the truth is that this latest act of penance will
serve no one but the legal firm of Corporate Shakedown & Artists.
Microsoft probably won't gain by going
forward. The company may have seen this as a way to score some public
relations points while concluding the litigation. Instead, Apple did its
own PR job, making it look as though Microsoft was using the settlement
to monopolize the schools market.
Nor are schools benefiting. Studies show
that simply adding computers to failing environments doesn't help. These
are some of the most disadvantaged facilities in the country; what they
need are real curriculums, devoted teachers and (we might add)
competition, not the latest version of Microsoft Outlook.
And then there's the judicial branch, which
once again finds itself drawing lines in the sandbox between Microsoft
and its competitors. In retrospect, what motivated the government's own
case was Microsoft's competitors--Netscape, Oracle--which used the
courtroom to accomplish what they couldn't in the marketplace. Judge
Motz now faces the similarly unpleasant task of apportioning tech
markets.
Finally, there's the matter of the
plaintiffs. Ridiculous as the suits are (America's cheap technology
prices are the envy of the world), these people expected something.
Instead, their lawyers realized that parceling out a settlement would
mean each of the 65 million consumers who had "overpaid" would get the
grand sum of $10, and crafted the school option instead.
Someone benefits, of course. Tucked into
the bottom of the deal was a line stating that, in addition to the
school gift, Microsoft would be liable for "reasonable" attorney fees,
to be determined by the court. Seeing as how the plaintiffs' attorneys
in question are Michael Hausfeld and Stanley Chesley--the class-action
wizards who have sued cigarette makers, gun makers, IBM, Goodyear,
Texaco . . . you get the picture--"reasonable" in their minds is a
percentage; these guys tend to get a bare minimum of 10% to 15%. So
consumers get a "social benefit" and the lawyers could get a cool $150
million.
We've seen this so many times, it's like a
bad cable movie. Microsoft, too, knows how the story goes. Whether the
lawsuits are frivolous or not, its options are the same: The company can
chance years of litigation, in dozens of cases, or it can simply sign
over one big, hundred-million-dollar payoff to the plaintiffs' bar.
Sooner or later the U.S. political system has to come to grips with this
kind of legal extortion.
The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be January 22.
For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of
activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
