Nearly lost in the noise surrounding AOL’s buyout of Time Warner was some fairly big news about Microsoft. Our favorite monopolist forked over at least $150 million — and most likely a lot more — to settle a civil antitrust suit that was about to go to trial in a Utah federal court.
Caldera Inc., owner of the nearly moribund DR DOS operating system, obviously had a strong case. The pre-trial legal filings were full of the usual Microsoft behavior — a litany of strong-arm tactics and lousy ethics.
Microsoft kept claiming its side of the story, which it planned to tell in court, would show it was pure as the snow that falls in the Utah mountains. That’s what Microsoft said before it started the federal antitrust trial in Washington, too, and we all know how the company’s executives came off when they told their side of the story. The judge plainly found them to be a pack of liars.
The announcement of the settlement couldn’t have been timed better for Microsoft. Amid the AOL Time Warner tumult, it will go almost unnoticed. That’s enormously good luck for Microsoft, because the public-relations hit would have been measurable if the world had learned that it had paid such a large settlement in a case it claimed was baseless.
The settlement amount is chump change for Microsoft, a monopolist that coins cash at a relentless rate and can’t spend it fast enough, but it’s a bonanza for a tiny software company in Utah that, from all appearances, bought DR DOS mostly for the purpose of the lawsuit. You can’t blame Caldera for taking the money and running.
But it’s a shame that the usual courtroom methods will apply here. Part of the settlement is an agreement to keep the terms and evidence secret. So the public will never get the chance to see just how badly Microsoft did — or didn’t — behave a decade ago when it was in the middle of its rise to power.