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

To: Dwight E. Karlsen who wrote (41187)	4/5/2000 2:22:00 AM
From: William C. Spaulding	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Thank you for your input. I know that the present lawsuit doesn't really deal with MS Office, but they're basically using the same technique. That's why I wrote the article that I did. Because with MS Office, Microsoft clearly succeeded in using predatory pricing to establish its MS Office monopoly, and, unlike the browser lawsuit, Microsoft has definitely recouped its costs, satisfying the 2 legal requirements for predatory pricing. And I think this case would be much easier to prove, since the evidence is strong and clear. I always wondered why IBM or Corel don't sue, or even ask the DOJ to investigate it. A lawsuit in this area might be worth billions to Corel, which really needs the money. Although I'm not a lawyer, it would seem that this case would be far stronger and easier to prove than the current lawsuit focused on the browsers.

To: Dwight E. Karlsen who wrote (41187)	4/5/2000 8:59:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Dwight - I believe that you are looking at a downstream effect - the various deals around "office bundles" (and related deals around the competitive products) were created prior to 1996, although the general practice at that time was to do 2-year contracts. When MSFT did not propose to renew those deals in the subsequent contracts, OEMs made the most of what they had through various pricing and bundling arrangements. It was the OEMs, not MSFT, who determined the pricing for various components as seen by the customer. There was never, as far as I know, any arrangement around what price the OEM charged for the components. One focus of the second trial, at least in the testimony, was around "windows experience" which MSFT used to control the content and "look and feel" of the desktop when it first was booted. MSFT wanted consistent appearance and content for that first boot. Threre are valid reasons to do that - it gives MSFT a known baseline on which to build installation of "layered products" - but MSFT went beyond that and claimed that they could control that particular point in the installation process because of copyright and license. Key OEMs, including CPQ (who was the only OEM to testify on MSFT's behalf) just ignored MSFT's request, and CPQ's presario continued to use custom installation sequences in their initial boot process. MSFT eventually gave up on trying to enforce "windows experience".