Priceless

There are some things even his money can't buy.

Get It Try It

• Paying peanuts for QADOS by lying about the transaction: $50,000.
• Settling out of court to Tim Paterson for lying about the transaction: $400,000.
• Scrambling in a panic to catch up with VisiCorp: millions.
• Producing the AARD code to scare people out of using DR-DOS: hundreds of thousands.
• Settling out of court to Caldera over the AARD code: $150 million.
• Hiring in David Cutler and his DEC team to tool VMS for the PC: millions.
• Sponsoring David Cutler's race car so he doesn't piss all over you: millions.
• Legal fees for the Department of Justice trial: millions.
• Fines imposed by the European Union: close to $1 billion.
• Cost of supporting SCO in harassment attack against IBM and open source: $50 million.
• Legal fees for negotiations with the European Union: millions.
• Bribes to governments and corporate leaders everywhere: tens of millions.
• Salaries for astroturfers in the Linux forums: a few million.
• Research to establish fake grass roots movements to protest DOJ investigations: hundreds of thousands.
• Legal fees etc to certify Windows secure as long as it doesn't have an external drive and it's not connected to the Internet: $20 million.
• Out of court settlements in class action suits against price gouging: several billion each.
• Compensation to Sun Microsystems for deliberately sabotaging the Java standard: $1 billion.
• Worldwide damage caused by the ILOVEYOU worm: $10 billion.
• Worldwide damages caused by all Windows worms, viruses, and trojans: hundreds of billions.
• Fees exacted by Bogusky for abortive ad campaigns with Seinfeld and out of work actors pretending to opt for crappy PCs: several hundred million.
• Providing a secure Unix-based operating system to over one billion users? PRICELESS.

For almost everything Bill has his credit card. But there are some things even his money can't buy.

We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.
 - Jim Allchin