ent came to an agreement with the software giant over the antitrust charges it had filed against the company. The charges were brought after the department found out that Microsoft was giving personal computer manufacturers a discount on their OS when the PC manufacturer would pay the company a royalty for each computer sold, including those that without MS-DOS or Windows software. “The practice gave PC makers little incentive to install competing programs since they would have had to pay a royalty to both the competitor and Microsoft,” (Ramstad 1). The settlement only dealt with this single count and left Microsoft alone to continue performing its numerous other anti-competitive practices.In the spring of 1995, Judge Stanley Sporkin rejected the deal that the Justice Department’s settled on. He did so on the grounds that 1. The government refused to give the court enough information about the agreement; 2. The deal was too narrow; it failed to deal with issues like OS/application leverage, and allegations that Microsoft intentionally made changes to Windows that made third party applications hard to run; 3. The parties did not adequately consider anti-competitive issues; 4. The deal was unsatisfactory when it came to enforcement and compliance mechanisms.Around the time of the settlement, some suggestions started to come about how to deal with Microsoft. Stewart Alsop suggested “that Microsoft be forced to document the API’s in Windows, so that other companies could legally clone it. That would still leave Microsoft an eighteen month head start on each release,” (Rapacious 3). It was also suggested that the company be broken up. This way, the operating system and the applications would be separated into different companies and the playing field would become more level.In late August 1995, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ended what had become a thirteen-month judicial review b...
