Gates paid $20m to adversary in anti-trust case

[emad]

Guardian
Mark Tran
Wednesday November 24, 2004

Microsoft paid $20m(£10.6m) to one of its fiercest critics, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, after the group dropped out of an EU anti-trust case against the software giant, it emerged today.

The CCIA abruptly withdrew from the EU's legal battle with Microsoft two weeks ago. The European commission fined Microsoft a record &euro497;m (£345m) in March for abusing its dominant position and ordered the company to sell a version of its Windows operating system without its Media Player audiovisual software. Microsoft has appealed against the ruling.

In addition to the CCIA, Novell, a software rival to Microsoft, also settled its dispute with Microsoft. Novell received $536m (£285m) from the software giant. The CCIA and Novell are the latest parties to bury the hatchet with Microsoft in the EU antitrust case.

Microsoft previously spent US$2.4bn (£1.3bn) settling claims by Time Warner and Sun Microsystems. Although the amount paid to the CCIA is tiny compared to the other settlements, its significance lies in the fact that the CCIA has long been a thorn in the side of Microsoft.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/microsoft/Story/0,2763,1358673,00.html

[phantom power]

1. Gates could wipe his ass with 20 million-dollar bills

That's not exaggerating by much. Consider: Last I heard, Gates was worth at least 50 billion. Let's allocate just one billion for ass-wiping. Assume that Gates craps once a day (on average), and that he lives to be 100 years old. That's 36500 squats. 1 billion divided by 36500 is a bit more than 27,000.

So, In reality, Gates could wipe his ass with thousand-dollar bills, for the rest of his life, and still have 49 billion left when he died. And that's assuming he never makes any more money.

[Voltaire99]

2. Exactly.

This is merely an operating expense for the nation known as Microsoft.

[DownNotOut]

3. About half

of what he gave * last year....


D.N.O