Electro Funk said:
Does anyone remember how they got out of this?
Yes... basically it comes down to George W. Bush being elected President of the United States.
Sadly, the story of Microsoft's antitrust case is one of not learning from the past.
Microsoft was originally brought up on antitrust charges due to forcing OEMs to preinstall a copy of Microsoft's operating system on every computer they made or face retaliation. The judge (Stanley Sporkin) in that case found Microsoft guilty and rejected a DoJ settlement as not being hard enough on Microsoft.
The case was sent back down after federal appeals court agreed with Microsoft/DoJ and a new judge was given the case (Thomas Penfield Jackson). Not knowing Microsoft he agreed to a settlement rather than retrying the case on it's merits.
After a few years of watching Microsoft disregard the settlement and getting new reports of antitrust violation, Jackson agrees to hear new charges from the DoJ about Microsoft (culminating in the
Findings of Fact). Jackson, who has now seen Microsoft in action for a number of years, decides that the company needs to be broken up.
The case was sent back down to have the punishment phase retried and a new judge was given the case (Colleen Kollar-Kotelly). With Bush being elected, the DoJ no longer see any issues with Microsoft's actions and suggests a settlement (Microsoft was both a major contributor to the Bush campaign and to many of John Ashcroft's races). Not knowing Microsoft she agrees to a settlement hearing rather than retrying the punishment phase of the case.
Kollar-Kotelly is only now learning what Jackson and Sporkin had found out before her... that for Microsoft it will always be less expensive to fight out these cases in court, settle, violate those settlements and go back to court than it would be to change their practices.
What we end up seeing in this case is that the federal appeals court doesn't want this case, that the judges are replaced when they get to know Microsoft for who they really are and that the resolve of the Department of Justice changes with the political climate in Washington.
With the DOJ attempting to break up Microsoft for antitrust violations, Redmond quickly made it a top priority to keep competitors ostensibly healthy. This meant helping Apple remain afloat with a $150 million investment in 1998. Microsoft also poured money into making sure that Macintoshes running Microsoft Office could easily interoperate with Windows machines. And it poured still more money into making sure that Internet Explorer for the Macintosh was in no way inferior to the Windows version. (even though they have discontinued explorer for macs) Without Microsoft's assistance, I think Apple would have been shuttered back then.
The reason for that money (1997) was to settle a patent case Apple had brought against Microsoft.
Microsoft needed that case to go away (quickly) as the DoJ's case started becoming much stronger and Jackson started showing signs that he was getting feed up with Microsoft's actions.
Still, this didn't stop Microsoft from continuing to use anticompetitive tactics against Apple.
I put up a page on my site about the
applications barrier to entry and it's effect on Rhapsody, but the
full testimony of Avie Tevanian in the Microsoft v. DoJ case paints a pretty clear picture of Microsoft's dealing with Apple.
Edit: This is basically an expanded version of IJ Reilly's post before mine.
