Microsoft News Tracker

Victoria Murphy Barret at Forbes has a retrospective of Microsoft’s recent antitrust lawsuit settlements and their new approach to resolving them:

Microsoft’s army of lawyers must be getting positively dizzy from all the peace pipes they are smoking.

For Microsoft it wasn’t about the money, it was about setting a tone. Nine antitrust lawsuits settled in 30 months. Hatchets buried in rapid succession with its oldest, staunchest rivals: Sun Microsystems, Netscape, RealNetworks. The tab: $3.8 billion (excluding $2 billion owed to states that filed class actions), or a rate of $4.2 million in settlement checks per day. Big numbers, but keep them in perspective: Microsoft has $40 billion in cash and earns $35 million more every day.
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Says its chief counsel, Brad L. Smith: “In the Internet era companies need to work more closely together. We are creating an approach for addressing diverging interests.”

More by following the link including a table of recent settlements.