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

To: John F. Dowd who wrote (32591)	11/7/1999 9:52:00 AM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Sun Microsystems the next possible Danger to us consumers The next and imminent danger to us consumers is now Sun Microsystems and their JAVA software. Free JAVA can be a famous Trojan Horse to defeat us the consumer!! They give it, for now, away for free to gain market share and make it popular. I think we will need to alert the State and US Attorney's of another potential plot of possible Monopoly with exorbitant monetary gains on our expense by Sun Microsystems. Money has a sinister way of scrambling sound business judgment. I urge you all to write and alert your State or US Attorney BWDIK Haim

To: John F. Dowd who wrote (32591)	11/7/1999 11:48:00 AM
From: Bob Drzyzgula	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

JFD: It is, perhaps, that nagging sense of having been harmed by Microsoft's behavior over the past few years that leads me to be somewhat less than sympathetic. Quoting Judge Jackson, "The decision to override the user's selection of non-Microsoft software as the default browser also directly disinclined Windows 98 consumers to use Navigator as their default browser, and it harmed those Windows 98 consumers who nevertheless used Navigator. In particular, Microsoft exposed those using Navigator on Windows 98 to security and privacy risks that are specific to Internet Explorer and to ActiveX controls." This is not "future potential harm", it is past and current actual harm. And that is but one, easily explained example. The routine, subtle perversion of standard protocols to exclude competition is a behavior that is particularly nasty. For example, Windows 2000 uses Kerberos for authentication. Under normal circumstances, this would be of significant benefit to consumers, especially those who had been using Kerberos in their networks for several years. However, Microsoft of course wouldn't see things that way. Microsoft had to modify the Kerberos protocol so that it could not be dropped into existing Kerberos environments. Microsoft's Key Distribution Center (KDC) implementation stores data unrelated to the core authentication service, and there is no way to split the two functions apart. Existing standards-based Kerberos clients supposedly can use the Microsoft KDC through a compatibility interface, but Microsoft clients cannot use non-Microsoft KDCs. Thus current Kerberos users who wish to unify their Windows and non-Windows authentication systems have to shut down their existing KDCs and rely exclusively on a secondary interface in Microsoft's products which cannot be relied on to anywhere near the degree as can the primary interfaces in existing, proven, fully open systems. Of course you can say here that this isn't harm, it's just a stupid, disappointing perpetuation of the status quo. This might be true were it not for the virtual impossibility of avoiding the use of Microsoft products and the consistency with which Microsoft applies this "embrace and extend" strategy to every protocol that they use. The net weight of all of these small corruptions is quite substantial. Ultimately, the task of mixing Microsoft products with non-Microsoft products swells to an unmanageable size, leading many consumers to give up trying. In the end it would appear to be a scene out of "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers". Judge Jackson's conduct may appear to some to be "entirely one-sided", but to others of us, it seems more as if he is one of those rare, brave people who have not yet encountered a pod. --Bob