Comment of the Day - February 26, 2006 - Microsoft Anti-Trust Settlements

My informal ticker has Microsoft at $14 Billion paid in settlement fees and fines for illegal activities. Related to: Microsoft and Officials in IBM's Linux Hot Tub

That's nearly half of their quarterly profits. Let me see, twenty five years or more of reprehensible and illegal business practices, dead corporate bodies everywhere, hundreds of billions of lost investment dollars, and a massive conversion of much of the world's most innovative efforts, and it amounts to a penalty of roughly two weeks worth of the normal Redmond business cycle.



Honestly, what kind of a criminal wouldn't like these odds? We went searching for excellence and we got a recidivist reprobate as the poster child of corporate profitability. And now the very essence of our republic is at stake.

Sometimes i think the world needs to hold a Davos for the rest of us conference, where we decide what to do with the mess we've made letting Redmond dollars warp our Rule of Law