Microsoft Blames Anti-trust Legal Fees for Price Increases 570
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?"
Cost of doing business... (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Informative)
So really hardware vendors have to stop cutting corners before you can just blanket state "oh just use Linux".
Tom
Take the jump. (Score:3, Informative)
If you are increasingly interested in Linux, but do not know where to start, grab knoppix.
Download here [knoppix.org].
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!
Re:They're not complaining about the fines... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:They're not complaining about the fines... (Score:4, Informative)
The other stuff does get charged just at a lower rate and such.
Re:A billion here, a billion there... (Score:2, Informative)
56 billion.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFTRe:They predicted it... it came true. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I realize you all hate MS here... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:They predicted it... it came true. (Score:2, Informative)
Economics of Monopoly Behaviour (Score:2, Informative)
EVERY cost gets passed on to customers (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Econ sidebar: pricing power != monopoly (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
Re:STOP SPREADING FUD! LINUX IS NO LONGER HARD (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:They predicted it... it came true. (Score:3, Informative)
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.