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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RTev who wrote (23960)	6/10/1999 3:28:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

And today we move onto what should be the weakest part of the government case, but continues to present suprising challenges to the MS team. seattletimes.com The federal judge hearing the Microsoft antitrust trial today took aim at one of the company's key defenses: that consumers benefits from having an Internet browser in the Windows operating system. ... Microsoft contends that it must prove only a plausible benefit to putting the two products together to be on safe legal ground. Further, the company maintains that intellectual property laws permits their engineers to determine how to best make those decisions. Showing that consumers could actually be harmed by including browsers in the operating system is an important element to the government's case. ... ... Microsoft employee Christian Fortini suggested in another document that the browser was overloaded with functions that really belonged in the operating system, suggesting that certain software code perform tasks that can be taken out. ''We have to stop adding nonbrowsing features into Trident (the code name for part of IE 4.0) and start taking some of the existing ones out,'' Fortini said. ... Felten compared these parts of code to groceries placed into a bag that could easily be moved around. The judge interjected: "In other words, you could put the rendering engine in another place." Felten agreed.