Microsoft has not paid out this kind of money unless it is settling a patent claim or antitrust judgement. The company is investing $400 million in its partnership with Novell to get Windows and Linux to operate nicely together on PCs.MSFT will be paying for coupons so that corporate customers can get annual licenses to the Suse Linux operating system. It is, in essence, paying for the distribution of the open source software that it has feared would take market share from Windows.With Vista, Microsoft’s new OS, about to launch, supporting rival Linux would seem a queer thing to do.Maybe not. If Microsoft become the de facto largest reseller of Linux, it will have some measure of control over how fast the open source initiative can grow. Novell’s annual sales are under $1.2 billion, and its rival in the Linux market, Redhat, has sales of well under $300 million.Microsoft also got a promise from Novell that it would not sue Microsoft over Windows, presumably over any patent issues or monopoly practices.That, by itself, could be worth $400 million.Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
Mr. Softy’s Big Pocketbook (MSFT)(NOVL)(RHAT)
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
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