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

To: t2 who wrote (24753)	6/23/1999 4:26:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

In any case, MSFT lawyers have done a good job in the rebuttal phase, IMHO. Too bad Lacovara was not running the show in the first phase. I agree on both points. Lacovara (whose name I misspelled the other day), especially, seems to have come into his own in this phase of the trial. I suspect that he's earned the right to take a primary role in molding the company's judgement briefs. [Hmm. On the edit screen, that sentence looks almost suggestive, but I'll let it go even though I can hear Austin Powers saying "Yeah, baby!"] He clearly did a good job of preparing Schmalensee for testimony this time. On the WalMart analogy: The Slate diarist for the trial suggested the other day that this is a case in search of a metaphor. None of the suggestions has worked. This is yet another deeply flawed analogy. Today's Slate story on yesterday's proceedings explains why we didn't see any reports until late in the day: They spent the morning reading AOL documents into the record: slate.com And the writer's take on the afternoon proceedings that were the subject of the stories that finally appeared: Nothing is happening except that Microsoft's final rebuttal witness, Dean Richard Schmalensee of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, is making funny faces. Sullivan & Cromwell's Michael Lacovara will ask him how some of Microsoft's teeny weeny rivals are doing. Schmalensee will screw up his Basil Rathbone face into something approximating rapture as he enthuses about how well Linux is doing ("big investors") or about the future of the "open source movement" ("fascinating, fascinating"). He seems more concerned about calibrating the correct balance of euphoria and academic dispassion on his face, than he is with the substance of his answer. And then finally, there's this. It's an epiphany experienced by Dahlia Lithwick, the Slate writer, after too many hours on the hard seats of Jackson's courtroom: The evangelical language is no accident. Microsoft is a secular church and Microsoft is on a crusade. Microsoft is impelled by the genuine conviction that in bringing its beliefs to the masses, it is saving us. Microsoft generally and Bill Gates in particular are zealots dedicated to bringing the whole world under the white wings of salvation. What other image can there be than that of a Holy Roman Empire, terrorized by even a shard of disbelief and responding to insignificant competitors with swift and brutal retribution? To any church, heresy--even minor heresy--can spread like a cancer. Because only a true religion understands that there is no room for competition in the battle for Salvation, Microsoft has brought to bear a whole panoply of good old fashioned religious remedies on its competitors: excommunication, denouncements, a few scattered stake-burnings, to stop them from leaving the fold. A picture of Bill Gates has emerged in this trial as the angry, jealous God of the Old Testament. He finds out in South America that IBM preloaded Lotus Smart Suite and goes ballistic because he was not consulted (we have seen the e-mails). Why, asks my colleague from CNBC, is it that Gates--while he permeates every part of this trial--has only ever been seen as an apparition, on videotape through a million bits of light and pixels? A burning bush for the '90s? Hmm. Maybe that explains the tone of the thread, eh? [And thanks for your comments about that, Jill and Teflon. And I agree that the bit of heresy experienced from the poster wasn't of much real value.]