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

To: t2 who wrote (27433)	7/27/1999 8:36:00 PM
From: Gerald Walls	Respond to of 74651

RTev, the last i read was that AOL is willing to negotiate with MSFT. Why would they want this? AOL's idea of "negotiate" may be how to get MSFT to pay for access to AIM.

To: t2 who wrote (27433)	7/27/1999 8:46:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

This battle is fun to watch, but you're right that it also has deeper significance. A ZDNet story deals with the problems AOL's blocking has caused for their lobbying group, the so-called "Open-Net" coalition: Is AOL the height of hypocrisy? zdnet.com "Open is open," said Legg Mason Precursor Group analyst Scott Cleland, who has long predicted that AOL will ultimately prevail and gain access to cable high speed Internet services. "When you're denying consumers a choice of something, it looks bad in any case." Online analyst Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, predicted AOL's position on cable access would ultimately trump its decision to close up its instant messaging product. AOL has shown its true colors in the IM battle. It isn't really an internet service provider. It's a network gatekeeper that happens to give its customer access to most parts of the internet. But it hides the internet behind proprietary tools that it then uses to direct and control its users. It's as far from an "open" system as an internet service can be. I think you're right, t2, that Microsoft has positioned itself wonderfully from a PR perspective in this battle. They appear to be the ones fighting the good fight for open standards and customer choice. It took Microsoft a long time to learn the "standards" lesson, but they've learned it well. It was Netscape that taught them taught them best. In many ways, Netscape was more responsible than Microsoft itself for the ultimate design of IE 4. While Microsoft sought to saddle the browser with a conglomeration of proprietary MS-created protocols and interfaces, Netscape fought a PR battle for "open" internet standards. It turned out that Netscape had the better story (and "story" is all-important in Redmond). Microsoft made an abrupt about-face and actually embraced the standards. Unfortunately for Netscape, Microsoft implemented the "story" much better than Netscape itself and came up with a better browser. Now it's Microsoft's turn to teach that same lesson to Netscape's new parent. But behind all that is the fun notion of the actual skirmish. Can you imagine how many 32-hour days have been put into this by teams in both Redmond and Dulles? I imagine the AOL team falling back into couches and sighing after they'd manage to change their protocols that first time, test them, and release them. "We beat them!" I suspect they said. Ah, but even more interesting is the thought of the hacker glee in Redmond that must have greeted the challenge. Within hours, they had back-engineered AOL's changes, overcome them, tested the changes and released an easily-installed new version. "You idiots," I imagine hearing. "Don't even think you can keep us out of there."

To: t2 who wrote (27433)	7/28/1999 2:58:00 PM
From: Alan Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Do AOL users have to download something every time another MSFT foil is added to the code? If so, those with slow modems are going to get tired of this nonsense quickly. Last I heard AOL was on the 5th foil version (in a week) and counting. It will be interesting to see if the MSFT vs Caldera team can make any points with this, as in "Look, if DR-DOS wanted to inter-operate with Windows they should have found any problems and worked around them. That's what we do." It works in rational sense, but probably not legally. Still, there's a jury involved.