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

To: Frank Ellis Morris who wrote (33544)	11/9/1999 8:55:00 PM
From: Brian Malloy	Respond to of 74651

Extracted from a previous post. Dealt with how MSFT was going to win the Win95/Win98 battle and have the freedom to inovate and integrate the IE browser in support of consumers. I don't know which paper or news service it came from. May have Barron's. Anyway some nice info regarding time for previous big A-trust cases to proceed. DOJ loves getting slapped and MSFT is going to ensure they keep on getting slapped as long as Klein and Reno are in power. More to the point, by the time any court decides, the issue will long since have become moot. In the next few days Windows 98 with the built-in browser goes out to the world. What the lawyers are arguing about will have become irrelevant to everyone else. If we were Bill Gates, we would set up an annuity to pay the lawyers and forget the whole thing. Go back to the business of running a software company. The IBM antitrust case lasted 13 years before being dismissed by the courts as hopelessly brainless. Thirteen years is roughly the period between the Apple II and Windows 95--the stone and bronze ages of the PC. The AT&T case, technically a "win," percolated for 10 years until the Bell decision to surrender its government-created monopoly. In 10 years Marc Andreessen went from being a seventh grader to becoming a multimillionaire in Netscape's public offering. Even the Standard Oil lawsuit dragged on for a decade in those less lawyer-clogged days. In short, we don't see much history being made here. It's already too late. Regulators never got their hands around the computer industry, and now the technology is moving so fast they never will.