It's Great to be a Rightist Monopoly in Proto-Fascist Times and be Above the Law

Being our periodic Micro$oft bashing....

The short version:

I’ve written before about Burst v. Microsoft, but the short story here is that Burst lawyers caught a pattern of apparent destruction of e-mail evidence on the part of Microsoft. Microsoft claimed it was “too hard” to search for the lost e-mails (Burst had copies from its side so many of the messages were known to exist) but the judge finally ordered Microsoft to do whatever it took to dig up the tapes and find the e-mails. Fortunately for Redmond, the case settled (for $60 million) before Microsoft actually had to produce anything.

The detailed version starts here.