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

To: John F. Dowd who wrote (33697)	11/10/1999 8:48:00 PM
From: johnd	Respond to of 74651

While the noise on this DOJ thing is in action, MSFT is busy with product pipe, IPOs, deals. On Sunday Gates gives keynote at COMDEX. Major win2000 related announcements are expected. This is the best of MSFT. I am going to focus on the products, strategy and let MSFT management worry about legal issues. The people at MSFT helm are the best in the business, they know how to deliver long term stock holder value.

To: John F. Dowd who wrote (33697)	11/11/1999 1:11:00 AM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

The real question is why shouldn't the browser be a part of the O/S? Now AAPL couldn't deal with it and let their "Dog.." die. Ok - that was their choice. It is a good question and there are great reasons to integrate the user experience of the two. For one thing, doing so can help a new user to get onto the internet (which, to a new user, usually means the web). But integration of the user experience doesn't require the tight code integration that Microsoft decided on. The best reason for that seems to have been legal and not technical. They needed to integrate the two as one product if they were to have any hope of overcoming consent decree restrictions. The code integration also gave them a stronger position in case of an antitrust action. Except for the legal considerations, I don't see much good reason for mixing the browser so deeply into the OS. I also didn't hear much in the trial that seemed to justify that uncharacteristic decision to meld the pieces together. Microsoft usually pulls pieces apart for ease of maintainance, development, and testing. From the time the decision was announced at Microsoft, my question was, "Why not do the same thing with Word? An OS needs some kind of text-display facility. They already ship a mini-word-process with the OS, so why not go all the way and munge Word in there?" That seems silly, perhaps. Word is too big. But what about a database engine? Having it available is important for developers, so much of the Jet engine was already either included in the OS or shipped with various products. So why not include the entire Access UI in the same way they include the browser UI? And then there's the anti-feature that occasionally irritates me most. I occasionally develop web sites for a couple of folks. Last year I did one that uses a lot of eye-candy tricks to cover up the fact that the sponsor of the site has little information to offer. I used DHTML and JavaScript tricks that require testing on multiple browser versions. It's easy to test it with any version of Netscape, but very difficult to test with multiple IE versions since it's really tricky and unstable to use multiple versions on a single machine. I got around it by using a second machine with an original browserless Win95 on which I could install different IE browsers. IE 4 is a great browser. That design experience removed my last doubts about it. But it's integration is a nasty design "feature".