universalis - 1:34 pm on May 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

I think the stockholders of AOL Time Warner win.

I couldn't agree less ;)

$750 million is a lot of money for a company 26 Billion it debt.

Sure, but if they'd stuck to the lawsuit, they could have got billions more. It was a pretty clear-cut case. $750 million equates to approximately 2% of Microsoft's cash reserves. Chump change, as netguy says.

HTML Developers win if they can stop writing for two browsers.

This will just reinforce the monopoly MS has on the browser market. AOL will now probably use IE for the next seven years, and develops will be encouraged just to code for IE rather than web standards, in the process locking out users of other browsers and operating systems. It'll be a sad day if you will need IE & Windows to use the web.

Microsoft has paid a huge amount to clear this case, so their win is hollow isn't it?

As I said, 2% of cash reserves. It's not a huge amount for Microsoft, especially for what they've gained with this deal.

Everyone wins if AOL and Microsoft can compete in the marketplace rather than in court.

They'll be collaborating more than competing in the technology field.

With Netscape having only 15% of the browser share, the outcome of the browser war was never in doubt.

Firstly, IE has about 95% market penetration. This was gained by anti-competitive behaviour, massive abuse of monopoly status, the deliberate destruction of the browser market, all of which is not only going unpunished, but the deal is so favorable to Microsoft that $750 million should be considered as a great investment rather than compensation.

The deal will mean that AOL will be instrumental in increasing the hold on the market of not just Internet Explorer, but also Windows Media Player, MSN Messenger and the nascent MS "Palladium" digital rights management technologies. Microsoft also has a tentative accord meaning that they could in the future gain access to AOL/Time Warner content - all this whilst removing the threat of the anti-trust lawsuit.

The only reason why AOL agreed to this was that they were so desperate for cash they were prepared to sacrifice Netscape and the Mozilla project just to reduce their debt by about 3%.