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

To: Valley Girl who wrote (41228)	4/5/2000 12:21:00 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 74651

VG~ Here's the 3rd article from The-Times, London.... speaking of "legal circus"...and how others view the situation...(the "bold" is my doing....) KLP The Times- Opinion-via Netscape the-times.co.uk THE CHIPS ARE DOWN Microsoft should survive but its rivals will still prosper Bill Gates, the founder and chairman of Microsoft, has chosen the long haul. He will spend millions more dollars, and use thousands more lawyer hours, to fight Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's ruling. The judgment that Microsoft enjoyed an effective monopoly over the operating systems for personal computers and improperly exploited this advantage to prevent an emerging challenger, Netscape, from soliciting for Internet customers is not surprising. The surprise is in Microsoft's decision to fight on rather than find an out-of-court way out of this legal swamp. Mr Gates defiantly claims that his company will win on appeal because "common sense stands on our side". As Mr Gates must know, common sense is a scarce commodity within the American legal system. Microsoft's willingness to go all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary is based on somewhat more than a blind faith in ultimate logic. The "death" of Microsoft is very much exaggerated. Mr Gates could, however, have foreclosed any prospect of the forced dismemberment of his empire had he offered concessions. He did not, because he feels passionately that a company is entitled to control the enhancement of its products and that his rivals are manipulating outdated law to destroy him. There are several reasons to suspect that the Federal Courts of Appeal may be much less radical than Judge Jackson. The rules require the US Government and the 19 states that have sued Microsoft to agree on one single proposed remedy that, along with Microsoft's alternative, will be placed before a judge. That unanimity will be very difficult to achieve; it will become still more complex if Governor George W. Bush, who has taken a softer line on antitrust matters, is elected President. Almost all the credible options for breaking Microsoft into smaller parts either risk creating fresh monopolies, or are intolerably impractical, or would not function to the clear benefit of consumers. Microsoft may also calculate, correctly, that the longer this case drags on, the harder it will be to persuade the courts that Mr Gates is still a functioning monopolist. The pace of change in this most dynamic of industries has always been the best defence against undesirable dominance by one vast corporation. The centre of this market has moved from the personal computer, where Microsoft is the most powerful actor, to the highly competitive Internet. Windows could be obsolete by the time the Supreme Court shapes a judgment. The purchase of Netscape, the original alleged "victim" in this affair, by America Online in 1998 and its deal with Time Warner this year will give Mr Gates competition aplenty. Microsoft may thus emerge from the courts in one piece, but having won only a pyrrhic victory. The company appears to have lost some of the edge that allowed it to capture the computer market in the early 1990s. Mr Gates conceded this in part when he chose to step down as chief executive officer earlier this year in order to devote more time to software development. This mammoth legal battle, which not only pits Microsoft against the US Government and a multitude of states but involves more than 100 civil lawsuits and, at some point, the European Union as well, is a damaging distraction for the company. Microsoft can probably survive but its rivals will prosper.

To: Valley Girl who wrote (41228)	4/5/2000 12:43:00 PM
From: John Carson	Respond to of 74651

Breaking news, whole article not available yet. Microsoft "fast-track" set 11:56 a ET All the parties in the Microsoft Corp. antitrust trial have agreed to a fast-track approach to the final penalty stage of the landmark case, Reuters news agency reported Wednesday.