Microsoft, RealNetworks reach settlement

Deal to end antitrust lawsuit valued at $761 million.

The gist of the lawsuit, in case you've not been following it goes like this:

RealNetwork: Judge, this monster here called Microsoft made it impossible for us to earn money because they gave their competing software away for free. We are entitled to some gazillion dollars in compensation for that. Please say yes.

Microsoft: We did no such thing, my Lord. We just made a better product and they couldn't keep up with our innovations.

Judge: Alright, alright. All this techno-babbles make my head hurt. Go away and byte each other. See if you can slip some hardware .... I mean..... hard cash .... into some software ......sorry .....soft hands. Now, I need to Winamp ..... I mean nap.

OK, maybe that's not exactly how it went down. I am not a lawyer, and I hate to play one. I am a technologist, and I know one or two things about crapwares. RealPlayer was a goodware at the initial stage. Then they got sucky. They made RealPlayer so incredibly difficult to configure and use (or uninstalled) that I abandoned them completely. I did not stop using RealPlayer because I liked MediaPlayer. No. As I write this, Media Player does NOT work on MY laptop:

In spite of the fact I couldn't make MediaPlayer work on my outdated Win2K3 trial version, I have not attempted to download and install Real Player - even though I could do so for FREE. Get that? There is a FREE Real Player, but I won't use it - and it's NOT because I prefer Media Player. RealPlayer lost me as an enthusiast a long time ago because it became crappy to use and update. I am not going back to using it - even if they bribe me to do so.

Why would MS pay Real 700-and-some million dollars? Is it because MS has too much money and they couldn't figure out how to spend it? Is it because it would cause that much (or more) to pay the lawyers to continue to litigate the issue? I don't know.

One thing I know for sure is that Real lost its bearings a long time ago, much like Netscape did. Netscape got so crappy I got migraine every time I try to get my web sites to display properly in Netscape. I stopped developing for Netscape long before they went out in flames. Same thing with Real. No amount of hush money will help Real, unless they get wise and invest that money in some usability R&D and stop blaming someone else for their troubles.

Any chance you think that will happen?