"Microsoft announced late Friday that it will pay more than $23 million to settle an antitrust suit filed by onetime operating system rival Be. Microsoft did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement, in which Be will receive $23.2 million after attorneys' fees. The total amount Microsoft will pay was not immediately clear from a joint statement by the two companies," reports CNet.
Comment: Be's lawsuit alleged that Microsoft closed it out of the PC market after it proved unable to get many OEMs to bundle it. It's not mentioned that Apple closed Be out of the Mac market, by eliminating the Mac-clone makers who did bundle BeOS for a while. But Be's best chance went when Apple (Amelio and Hancock) decided not to buy Be to form the basis of the Mac's new operating system, and instead bought Next Technology, for its NextStep version of Unix.
BeOS was first launched on the BeBox, a PC with two PowerPC processors, in 1995, though it was originally written for the AT&T Hobbit processor (which the Apple Newton was originally going to use -- Steve Sakoman, head of Apple's Newton Group, worked on both machines). If Be Inc had started writing it for Intel PCs in 1990, before Windows took off, it might well have done much better ... but with most of Be's early staff being refugees from Apple, it's very unlikely they'd have done that.
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