Are Lawyers fighting for you against MS, or for their wallet?

Time after time the amount of state & government lawsuits against MS has been flooding and just over the past couple months they are either being appealed or settled.

But the question is... who is really benefiting here.

When your state/government sue MS and loses, you just cost yourself (the tax payer) a fortune, as well as cost MS a fortune in lawyer costs.  For your state, these costs don't come out of thin air, it's your tax money.  For MS, those costs come from their products.  Maybe theres a more obvious reason that 2000/XP costs more than previous versions of Windows.

Ok I'm really reaching here... but these massive payouts have to come from somewhere and at this rate I have to wonder if Longhorn will cost $399 or if they'll have to double the price of MS-SQL 2005 server.

The only people benefiting from these lawsuits are the privately hired lawyers and politicians that think it will boost their career if they took on the "big bad evil company Microsoft".

In fact I have nothing more to say on the matter, there's no easy fix.  We're all screwed.  Welcome to the beauty of opinion blogging, I can just stop caring in the middle of my rant and end it.  We're all screwed, feed the almightily greed!

I'm just sick of the obviously stupid lawsuits.  MS getting sued for providing IM services for free (those bastards!) in the OS.  MS getting sued for Media Player because Real can't compete?  Did everybody forget Windows 3.1x had "Media Player" and that was almost a decade before Real was a company?