Digital Trends
If this doesn’t teach companies to be wary of making deals with Microsoft’s legal team when they think they have the Redmond software giant over a barrel…we don’t know what will.
Here we go: Back in 2002, haptics developer Immersion filed a lawsuit against both Microsoft and Sony, alleging that the biofeedback tech—a.k.a. rumble—in PlayStation and Xbox controllers violated Immersion patents. Microsoft settled for $26 million in 2003. End of story, right? Oh, no.
Internal Microsoft email messages unsealed by a federal judge as part of the “Vista Capable” class action lawsuit reveal considerable trepidation even amongst Microsoft’s high-level executives about how well Vista would fare on then-current systems. The messages also include seemingly plain admissions that Microsoft capitulated to Intel and lowered hardware requirements for Windows Vista so Intel could keep selling chipsets that, otherwise, would have had no future under Vista.
Back in 2001, Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice reached a settlement in the government’s antitrust case against the Redmond software giant. Although many industry watchers felt that Microsoft had gotten off easy, the settlement did find the company had abused monopoly power in the computer software marketplace, and subjected the company to federal scrutiny and regulation. Key elements of that agreement are set to expire on November 12, 2007, and while the Justice Department and a collection of states headed up by New York seem pleased with Microsoft’s conduct under the agreement, other states – headed up by California – worry Microsoft will quickly fall back into the same anticompetitive behaviors which led it to dominate the operating system market and run competitors like Netscape into the ground.
Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against haptics developer Immersion Corporation, claiming Immersion has violated terms of a 2003 licensing agreement which granted Microsoft money in the event Immersion settled with Sony over the use of patent “rumble” technology in its Dual Shock Playstation controllers. The details and history of the lawsuit are complicated, and seem to hedge on making fine distinctions between what constitutes a “settlement” and what constitutes a “business agreement.”
Paul Allen is known for many things—being the reclusive co-founder of Microsoft, being a massive Jimi Hendrix fan, building Seattle’s Experience Music Project and new football stadium, running a wide variety of business interests, and devoting time and money to health and human services philanthropy. Now one of Paul Allen’s technology projects looks to be getting ready for market: the FlipStart portable computer, which promises to bring the capabilities of a notebook system to a 1.5-pound, portable handheld device. But will the price—and the design—doom it from the start?
In 2004’s World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Microsoft founder Bill Gates predicted “Two years from now, spam will be solved.” Has Microsoft and the rest of the industry lived up to that pledge?
An article by Todd Bishop in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer examines several sides of the spam issue and finds the answer isn’t straightforward. While spam continues to consume tremendous amounts of bandwidth and storage around the world, one could argue computer users taking advantage of modern email filtering technology have greatly reduced the impact of spam on their everyday lives.
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