Heh, I remember finding shreds of these news groups threads and news letters posted to Geocities and such in the mid-90's when I was coming of age. "The MUF List" - Microsoft's Undocumented Features, etc. I still have my DOS programming books but I never really did much myself, other than some assembly programs written in debug. The list of dirty things MS did to other companies is extensive. The DriveSpace debacle was the one I remember most. If memory serves, they tricked the company that made a compressed filesystem driver for DOS/Windows to "license" the feature to MS, then MS just forgot to ever pay them. The company was so cash starved they couldn't outlast a lengthy lawsuit to recoup what they were legally owed. MS did every dirty trick they could. Bill Gates is one seriously dirty MFer.
> The company was so cash starved they couldn't outlast a lengthy lawsuit to recoup what they were legally owed.
They were actually paid $120M by Microsoft [1]:
> A Los Angeles jury Wednesday ordered Microsoft Corp. to pay $120 million for infringing a software patent held by Stac Electronics Co., a much smaller software firm based in Carlsbad, Calif.
Stac sued MS and won. But, Microsoft counter-sued Stac for reverse engineering MS software-- Microsoft's claim was that the features used to implement Stacker were undocumented by Microsoft, and only used internally by Microsoft. Microsoft won this suit. And, ultimately "invested in" Stac and paid some royalties as the ultimate settlement.
The "funny" thing was that Microsoft was claiming that it documented everything and that competitors could make equivalent competing products to their own on their platforms to the court in the anti-trust case that was around the same time.
MS management and their company were and are sleazy and ruthless to a fault.
The topic of the thread was _Microsoft_ doing sleazy things, specifically displaying fake error messages when it sensed a competitor's product being used (using obfuscated xor encrypted self-modifying code to hide their activities). Microsoft and their execs, as illustrated by this and the countless other examples _are_ sleazy, ruthless, cheats, who did/do not believe they had/have a superior product that could/can win on its own, so had/have to resort to sleaze like this, and other sleaze like forbidding vendors from selling any other OS, or the vendor would have to pay much more to MS. Some of their actions were illegal, but escaped consequences (in the US) due to stepping their use of campaign contributions (legalized bribery) and lobbying after the anti-trust case was brought against them.
But, even factoring horrible companies/executives like those in the tobacco and petroleum industry, Microsoft is still pretty high up in the list. E.g., without a logarithmic scale, you wouldn't be able to even see the data points for most grocery store companies when plotted on the same sleaziness graph as Microsoft while Microsoft/their execs would probably still show up on a graph that included fossil fuel and tobacco companies/execs.
As for, "feature not a bug", the ongoing human caused collapse of every ecosystem on the planet and the resulting mass extinction shows that maximizing profits at all costs is a bug. The existence of favelas walking distance to private estates show that the way this system concentrates wealth is a bug. Even on the level of Microsoft stealing from and killing off competitors, we lose. Many Microsoft competitors had better products and were far more innovative (hence Microsoft needing to steal from them / eliminate them)-- only Microsoft gained by their demise.
Somehow it seems like "paid" is the wrong word when you're forced by a court to do it. Almost like stealing a car and then claiming you "donated" it to the true owner upon arrest.
Winning a settlement doesn't automatically get you the money. It just gives you legal rights when trying to collect -- you still have to actually collect, which can be difficult and time-consuming.
Do we know if MS actually paid this settlement, and if so, on what schedule?
The way I understood the story back then was that they wanted a license deal with MSFT just like MSFT had with the hardware companies. MSFT wanted to just buy them out. Lawsuits, court, and so on finally forced the sale of the company to MSFT for the amount in the settlement.
Microsoft entered into negotiations with Stac Electronics to licence Stacker, but the deal fell though (allegedly, Stac claim that Microsoft didn't offer any money, just the right to sell enhancement products).
So Microsoft instead licensed a competing product called DoubleDisk from Vertisoft. So of course MS didn't pay anything to Stac Electronics, but presumably Vertisoft was compensated (hopefully fairly, we haven't heard otherwise... But this is Microsoft)
Stac later successfully sued MS for patient infringement, which is where the story about Microsoft alleged "no cash licensing" offer came from.
Is it? How so? I'm not saying they're angels, but I don't know if I'd consider the MSFT of today "worse" than in the 90s and early 2000s. It's certainly a more complicated beast than it was then.
