Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft May be Following GM's Road Map

"[Microsoft's] Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop,' or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment.... Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar's investment in SCO."

--Larry Goldfarb, Baystar, key investor in SCO

Summary: Microsoft -- like SCO and GM -- seems to be going the wrong way and it knows it

THE NEW YORK TIMES has just published this article about investment in lawsuits. It immediately brought to mind SCO, for obvious reasons (see that quote at the top).

Richard W. Fields says he has come up with a win-win financial strategy for the downturn. He is investing in lawsuits.

Richard W. Fields, chief of Juridica Capital Management.

Not in trip-and-fall cases, mind you, but in disputes that are far larger, more costly and potentially more lucrative, often pitting major corporations against each other.

Mr. Fields is chief executive of Juridica Capital Management. which runs a fund that invests in one side of a lawsuit in exchange for a share of any winnings.


According to Heise, "Pamela Jones [...] has told Infoworld that Microsoft will be the next SCO Group." SCO can be rendered finished almost any day now and following SCO's footsteps we have General Motors, which declared bankruptcy last week. IDG has just published an article with an eye-catching headline: "Is Microsoft Following GM's Road Map?" [hat tip: David Gerard]

“Microsoft is having a tough ride as it becomes a debt-saddled entity.”The article itself is almost a praise for Microsoft (well, typical for IDG/IDC, whose major clients include Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]), so it seems like trollish bait. In reality, Microsoft is having a tough ride as it becomes a debt-saddled entity.

"The Mac is still a niche market, not a threat," quotes DaemonFC from this article. "Linux supporters have yet to unite and battle the Redmond giant. Essentially, Microsoft has one advantage over GM: The competition won't cause its downfall."

This is nonsense. Microsoft itself contradicts this argument out in open and in private. Going a few years back into private correspondence, Jim Allchin, Microsoft's Platform Group Vice President, wrote: “We are not on a path to win against Linux.” Later he wrote that he was "scared" of GNU/Linux and subsequently he added: "LH [Longhorn] is a pig and I don't see any solution to this problem."

"They wanted people to switch to Vista," says mtnd3w, "and everyone claimed how Vista is so much better... now we have Windows 7."

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