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

To: rudedog who wrote (41205)	4/5/2000 2:41:00 AM
From: Dwight E. Karlsen	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

"In any event I believe that they did abandon those practices and in general abided by the terms of the consent decree." While they may have had the correct legal mumbo jumbo in their contracts with OEMs, its clear that somehow they have tightened their relationships with OEMs, so that today it's harder to get a WinTel PC without an MS Application Suite than it was in the past. Consider this: Let's say you want a Gateway Desktop PC with Corel WordPerfect Suite 2000 preloaded: You can do it, but you must pay an extra $99, AND you MUST also accept the MS-Suite, whether it's MS-Works or MS-Office. That smells strongly to me like MS has Gateway in a contract whereby Gateway must load an MS Suite on every PC shipped, to get a price of $XX.XX per copy. That's the same contract that has been used to market Win9X. It technically may not exclude Gateway from loading another suite on, but the consumer ends up paying for both suites. Some choice.