• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Foliovision

Main navigation

  • Weblog
    • FV Player
    • WordPress
    • Video of the Week
    • Case Studies
    • Business
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Meet the Team
    • We Support
    • Careers
    • Contact
    • Pricing
  • Products
  • Support
    • FV Player Docs
    • Pro Support
  • Login
  • Basket is empty
Affordable VAST/VPAID for Wordpress has arrived. Serve ads with your videos starting today!

Price of Antitrust: $4 billion and climbing

25 December 2007 / Alec Kinnear / Leave a Comment

Does software crime pay?

On paper, it looks like it does. And very well.

Over at roughlydrafted.com, Daniel Eran Dilger gives a short history of how Microsoft, embraced, extended and extinguished through the eighties and nineties. In the end it turns, out Microsoft has paid more than $4.2 billion in antitrust and patent infringements, not counting the impending EU (European Union) settlement.

Legal System Catches Up a Decade Later.
Those cases between Apple and Microsoft established that the legal system wasn’t going to prevent or curtail criminal behavior in software development, but could only offer at best a review of copy infringement well after the damage was done….By the end of the 90s, reality reigned in on Microsoft and it began racking up a series of settlement obligations it was forced to pay to other victims of its copy-killing efforts and related anti-trust actions:

    • Microsoft paid Caldera $275 million for its antitrust actions against DR-DOS.
    • Microsoft recently settled with IBM in an antitrust suit involving OS/2 and IBM’s Lotus SmartSuite applications to the tune of $775 million.
    • Microsoft paid Novell $539 million to settle its antitrust suit over the NetWare operating system, and Microsoft is still being sued by Novell over claims related to WordPerfect.
    • Microsoft paid Palm over $23 million to settle an antitrust suit over the unfinished BeOS.
    • Microsoft settled with Sun in an agreement that included $700 million in antitrust and $900 million in patent infringements, both related to Java.
    • Microsoft paid AOL $750 million to settle the antitrust suit over Netscape.

Of course, Microsoft has earned far more than they paid out.

At the same time, one can say that Microsoft is more or less hamstrung now:

  • the level of mistrust from other software developers is insurmountable
  • the regulatory bodies in both the US and more particularly the EU are watching Microsoft’s every move
  • consumers don’t trust them either
  • open source continues to knock down walls
  • legacy code support hinders good developers from writing clean apps
  • their marriage with the devil of DRM (digital rights management) makes their OS unwieldy and alienates the consumer still further

We are running our offices on Open Office and couldn’t be happier. There are some issues with shortcuts in the spreadsheet application (the one good product in the whole Microsoft portfolio is Excel).

But we have ten computers over three operating systems working in perfect sync, all on the same open source software with a little help from Google Apps. We are running some Windows XP, but mainly for testing and as a bridge to Linux (Linux is getting better and so are we – we are acquiring the skills necessary for a successful implementation: previous staff was familiar with Windows).

Alec Kinnear

Alec Kinnear

Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.

Categories: WordPress Tags: Microsoft, software development

Related Posts

  1. Microsoft AdCenter Setup for Mac Users

    Microsoft AdCenter Setup for Mac Users

  2. Windows

    Windows

  3. Commercial License

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You can click here to Subscribe without commenting

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Business
  • Camera Reviews
  • Case Studies
  • Design
  • FV Player
  • Internet Marketing
  • IT
  • Life
  • SEO
  • Slovak
  • Video of the Week
  • WordPress

Footer

Our Plugins

  • FV WordPress Flowplayer
  • FV Thoughtful Comments
  • FV Simpler SEO
  • FV Antispam
  • FV Gravatar Cache
  • FV Testimonials

Free Tools

  • Pandoc Online
  • Article spinner
  • WordPress Password Finder
  • Delete LinkedIn Account
  • Responsive Design Calculator
Foliovision logo
All materials © 2025 Foliovision s.r.o. | Panská 12 - 81101 Bratislava - Slovakia | info@foliovision.com
  • This Site Uses Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  • Site Map
  • Contact
  • Tel. ‭+421 2/5292 0086‬

We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

You can find out more about which cookies we are using or switch them off in .

Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie allow you to log in and download your software or post to forums.

We use the WordPress login cookie and the session cookie.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.

Support Cookies

Foliovision.com uses self-hosted Rocket.chat and self-hosted Freescout support desk to provide support for FV Player users. These cookies allow our visitors to chat with us and/or submit support tickets.

We are delighted to recommend self-hosted Rocket.chat and especially Freescout to other privacy-conscious independent publishers who would prefer to self-host support.

Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!

3rd Party Cookies

This website uses Google Analytics and Statcounter to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.

Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.

We reluctantly use Google Analytics as it helps us to test FV Player against popular Google Analytics features. Feel free to turn off these cookies if they make you feel uncomfortable.

Statcounter is an independent Irish stats service which we have been using since the beginning of recorded time, sixteen years ago.

Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!