Apple Slams Microsoft Settlement

Versaj writes "In a move that may further escalate the growing rift between Apple and Microsoft, Apple openly condemned Microsoft's $1.1bn settlement to in the recent class action lawsuit. Apple interprets the settlement as Microsoft's attempt to thwart competition in the California education market. "Remember: this is a settlement imposed against Microsoft for breaking the law. It should not allow Microsoft to unfairly compete in education, one of the few remaining markets where it doesn't have monopoly power.""

Re:Lets keep in mind...

[MrResistor]

Why vouchers? What is the EXACT wording of the settlement with regards to how those vouchers can be used?

I think those questions alone make Apples comlaints legitimate. MS will do everyhting in their power to make sure this settlement works out to their advantage, so I think it's important that the dissenting voices be as loud as possible.

As for me, I'm not prepared to accept this settlement as a good thing until I can read the fine print and determine if I can use these vouchers to help a certain ailing Linux distro. If I can't do that, then this settlement is nothing more than MS trying to further extend their monopoly.

Re:Apple, Microsoft, Rift?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and as somebody later said, Apple ONLY has taste.

That's the problem. Microsoft puts out products that are "good enough". Apple puts out products that are "great". This means Apple will always be a niche player.

I'm not sure why this is a "big deal" to a lot of people, since every other (competitive) industry has plenty of niche players (think, stereos, cars, etc). I guess in the computer industry you have to strive for every desktop for interoperability reasons and "network effects".

Reminds me of college: I was in engineering, and I knew this guy who didn't give a shit about lab reports and stuff like that. He'd always say "just put down some bullshit and turn it in, you'll probably get an A". Well, that's what he did, and I always put effort into my reports as if someone was going to read every page. Well, we both would get A's, but I spent nights working on it, and he just cut and paste and filled the space.

Re:Makes sense..

[MalleusEBHC]

Appleworks is a good word processing replacement. For 99% of the people, it will provide the word processing features they need. However, the biggest problem with it is that it does not handle converting M$ Word documents well. And let's face it, pretty much no matter where you go, you will need to interact with M$ Word documents.

From the people I know who use Excel extensively, Appleworks does not cut it as a spreadsheet app. Excel apparently far outdoes it in features. I don't know about how well it handles conversions, but if it is anything like the word processing side of Appleworks, I don't think it will be pretty.

I think Apple realizes the niche that Appleworks fills. It is a nice, cheap office suite for students and some non-advanced consumers. I use Appleworks to type all my papers for college, and it fits that need very well. When I need something a little more powerful, I bust out OpenOffice.

I think Apple realizes that rather than possibly trying futilely to expand Appleworks beyond what it is, they can support different projects or create new ones to fill the needs of office suite users. Keynote looks like one hell of a Powerpoint killer from everything I have seen and heard. Also, I don't think it is coincidence at all that Apple released their version of X11 a day or two before OpenOffice released a new beta. Those releases combined with Safari makes it very clear that Apple is weening itself off its dependence on the beast from Redmond.