Taking loans to settle crime?

Microsoft's collusion with Intel is white-collar crime which we last wrote about here. This class of crime is the most severe and most damaging to the economy, so equally severe punishments are necessary although they are rarely delivered in corporocracies. Either way, there were a couple of major developments in what had become a class action court case.

New evidence has appeared which indicates that Microsoft knew exactly what it was doing.

A group within Microsoft Corp. recommended in 2005 that the lowest-priced version of Windows Vista be released without the "Vista" name because of concerns over "user product expectations," according to documents unsealed by a federal court Wednesday.

The disclosure was made in a filing by the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit that claims Microsoft misled consumers with its "Vista Capable" marketing program in the months leading up to the January 2007 release of the operating system.

The consequences? Well, IDG also wrote about the possibility of $8.5 billion in damages.

Microsoft Corp. would have to come up with as much as $8.5 billion to settle accounts with the customers affected by its 2006 "Vista Capable" marketing program, according to documents unsealed by a federal court.

U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman released the figures yesterday from the class-action lawsuit, which claims Microsoft misled consumers with the Vista Capable campaign in the months leading up to the January 2007 release of the operating system.

Microsoft is already entering debt [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], so hypothetically speaking, where would it pull almost $9 billion from? More loans?

In other related news, Microsoft's partners in crime [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] see their chief quitting. Craig Barrett, who verbally attacked OLPC (benevolent charity) and used other means to counter this price-fixing breaker, is permanently out. As we noted yesterday, this company (Intel) is also suffering massive layoffs, a 90% profit drop, and Wintel as a whole is under siege. ARM and some microchips from China are in a great position to replace old-school x86. Windows is hugely dependent on end-end x86. ⬆