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

To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (33750)	11/11/1999 9:32:00 AM
From: Bob Drzyzgula	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

The newspapers reported this part of the testimony in detail. BTW, At computerwire.com you'll find an excellent archive of the trial coverage. Warning, however, to Duke, JFD et al: I expect that y'all will find their coverage to reflect an anti-MSFT bias. I always found their coverage quite enjoyable, but then you'd probably expect that, too. :-) Oh, and I was thinking about "remedies" (yeah, I know -- we don't need no stinkin' remedies) and it occurred to me that, instead of splitting MSFT into Baby Bill clones, or along product lines, why not just split them off from a good share of their cash pile? Not to give it to the treasury, of course, but rather create a new company with a pile of cash, give MSFT stockholders (Bill included, of course) proportional equity, and set them to competing. I don't think that you'd necessarily have to give them much in the way of IP, with maybe a few billion in cash (surely Bill could find that much lost behind his couch cushions) they ought to be able to buy or create what they'd need. That, together with a continued insistence that MSFT operate within the law, perhaps also with some pricing-related consent decree (like that they'd have to have a single price schedule for all OEMs -- it could still be volume based with discounts for taking multiple products, but all OEMs would buy off the same schedule, and the decree could have a short life, maybe four years or something), would seem to me to (a) sufficiently destabilize their monopoly, (b) leave the successful MSFT formula intact but ever-so-slightly weakened from a cash and intimidation standpoint, and (c) do no major harm to shareholders; perhaps even create additional wealth for them. Just a thought. --Bob