[Swordmaker]

Maybe maybe not. MS had been threatening to pull off the platform, which would have hurt Mac immensely. MS’s agreement to keep making Office for Mac didn’t really cost MS anything, and helped Mac a lot, then MS turns around a makes a tasty profit on the stock. If what MS got out of that is for being on their way to losing I’d kill to lose some suits like that.

Why do you think they were threatening to pull off the platform? They were using it to attempt to force Apple into dropping the suit because they were losing. Instead the threat got them into a settlement negotiation in which they essentially gave Apple everything in exchange for what? Apple's agreement to put Internet Explorer on Macs... a free browser? Microsoft was taken to the cleaners in this negotiation because THEY wanted the lawsuit they were losing over and done with.

[discostu]

Let’s understand how MS was “taken to the cleaners” here:
After the suit they continued to sell their $150 product to 8 million paying customers (1.2 BILLION dollars worth of revenue if everybody bought 1 copy)
They got their browser as the default on Macs during the height of the browser wars, and remember Netscape was ahead in 97
And they got all that stock they later sold at a profit

You call that being taken to the cleaner?! They made at least 10 to 1 profit on that settlement possibly as much as 15 to 1, if that’s being taken to the cleaner where do I sign up.