I think all are correct in MSFT's earnings and the subsequent rise in price. It dominates the desktop, and the proliferation of cheap PC's will indeed feed it. Windows 98 has been a success, and they are expanding into other areas through Windows CE. In addition, it is the darling of the mutual fund managers. They will not want to admit that any pick of theirs, especially one they are so heavily into, could go down, so they will drive it up. I don't think if it doesn't make its numbers matters much, it is a monopoly and as such will benifit.
However, I must,and I am sure to take some major gratuitous verbal abuse for this, side with Toy. If I was a DOJ lawyer, I would take it that the AOL/NSCP deal was due to MSFT destroying NSCP's market and forcing it to find a partner. Sure, all do well, but so what in a legal sense. This is about past practice, not current conditions.
If you look at the Standard Oil situation ( here it comes again.) you will find that indeed at the time Standard was broken up, they no longer had a monopoly. Texas in the USA and Russia in Europe were coming on line with gobs of oil, and they were not and would not be under Standards control. Yet the Supreme Court ruled that their past practices were anti competitive and hence it was broken up. Once again, I think the parallels are amazing. Willl it happen again, I don't know. But I think that MSFT is a winning investment regardless of what happens.
Finally, I think the real winner of the AOL merger is Sun, but I am a technology babe in arms, so I relent to those that have more info. |
