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Please don't put thoughts into my head | 111 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Please don't put thoughts into my head
Authored by: PJ on Saturday, October 06 2012 @ 02:07 PM EDT
By the way, here's something you might want to consider, that the judge dismissed Novell based on his idea that there was no middleware threat, among other things. So not everyone agrees that Microsoft behaved badly enough to merit an antitrust label. The judge didn't. Here's what he wrote:
I need not decide this issue because, even assuming Novell's argument is correct, its claim nevertheless fails for three separate and independent reasons: (1) Microsoft's conduct was not anticompetitive within the meaning of the Sherman Act; (2) Novell did not present sufficient evidence from which a jury could find that its products would have been successfully developed as middleware; and (3) there is no underlying business reality to the claims.
So your comment that it's obvious to everyone that Microsoft was guilty of antitrust violations isn't so. Nor is it obvious that the only issue is timing on Novell's part. What the holdout juror didn't agree about was the idea that what Microsoft did resulted in damage that could be quantified and ordered as paid to Novell for what Microsoft did. Here's how Deseret News reported his own words, in an excerpt from the first article I did on the deadlocked jury:
One juror kept Novell Inc. from exacting as much as $1.3 billion from one-time rival Microsoft Corp. for alleged antitrust violations.

Corbyn Alvey, a 21-year-old security guard, was the lone holdout who deadlocked the 12-person jury after three days of deliberations in the complex, two-month trial in federal court.

"I walk away feeling honestly myself, and I can't speak for the other jurors, that I made the right decision even if it resulted in a hung jury," he told the Deseret News Friday. "There were so many inferences that needed to be drawn that I felt that it was unfair to Microsoft to go out on a limb and say yes."...

Novell attorneys were clearly upset with the hung jury. Johnson said, "One juror had strong technical views, and he wasn't about to budge."...

Alvey, the holdout juror, said the jury agreed on the technical aspects of the case but disagreed on the marketing aspects or what Novell could have accomplished "but for" Gates' decision. "There was a lot of speculation in this 'but for' world," he said.

I think you can see that his reasons don't precisely match what you seem to think. He really didn't agree totally with the rest, even on the antitrust part. He agreed Microsoft acted badly, but he wasn't sure it was bad enough to merit finding guilt and the damages that would ensue. So what i wrote wasn't well-written, but it was not inaccurate altogether either. It was like what you wrote, accurate as far as it goes, but not complete.

So that is part of the issue on appeal, whether what Microsoft did was bad enough, meaning did it not only try to harm Novell but did it succeed in the antitrust sense.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • Out of context? - Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, October 09 2012 @ 04:15 PM EDT
    • Out of context? - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 12 2012 @ 04:25 PM EDT
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