Microsoft facing new legal challenges
WinInfo | at | by Mike
Microsoft will be heading to court soon, but not for the wider antitrust case, which is awaiting the decision of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. Instead, the software giant is facing two other legal challenges, by UNIX giant Sun Microsystems and the remainder of Be Inc., which once made a rival operating system, and a slew of antirust lawsuits that might be combined into a single class-action suit.
And in early October, a federal court in Baltimore will determine whether over 100 antitrust suits against Microsoft will be combined into a single class-action suit. Judge Frederick Motz of the US District Court for the District of Maryland has set an October 1 deadline for class action certification. Additionally, the judge has set an October 24 hearing date for determining whether Microsoft will be bound by the findings already issued in company's federal antitrust case. What all these court cases prove is that Microsoft's antitrust problems won't end with Kollar-Kotelly's ruling. But if the past is any indication, we can expect the software giant to emerge relatively unscathed from these problems as well. As time marches on, whatever damages Microsoft might have caused in the past seem more and more remote, thanks largely to the fast-moving nature of the PC industry.