Jill... excellent post. Couple of extra throughts: 1. It is important to note that the Judge so far has only found that Microsoft enjoys a monopoly in the relevant market. He did NOT state that Microsoft had an ILLEGAL monopoly -- and, in fact, I would argue that Microsoft has a LEGAL monopoly.
2. The Judge DID find that Microsoft abused it's monopoly position, and here I see the potential for MUCH danger to Microsoft.
The Judge specifically noted large revenue losses to IBM and Apple, and (I believe, without looking back) to Intel. That would form the basis, in my opinion, for very nasty civil suits against MSFT by the affected (afflicted?) parties. Just guessing, given the size of the market, and the role of those parties, the damages could make the tobacco settlement the model for the (now wealthy) trial lawyers -- rather a sad sidelight to this matter, imho. In other words -- possibly billions..
Thanks very much for that post,,, I'm going to re-read it to see if I missed anything.. Initially I don't see all that much downside impact on MSFT, but longer term, without being able to "leverage" it's monopoly, it's going to be less and less relevant as middle level software systems become more pervasive. In other words, the future MSFT ain't MSFT... it might be QCOM, but not MSFT.. very much just IMHO, of course.
Great post!!
tso |
