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To: Harvey Allen who wrote (23967)	5/25/2000 9:06:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

'Pissy emails from billg' - MS exec sinks teeth into Gates theregister.co.uk Meanwhile, a bit from a week back, demonstrating that not everyone at Microsoft was in favor of leveraging the Windows monopoly at all costs. Who'd have thought, me and Brad Silverberg, onetime Mr. Windows, in agreement that all this OS integration business is a crock, and on Bill's whingeitudiousness too. Silverberg's emails were written to Ben Slivka, another one of Microsoft's most talented execs. Both have subsequently left the company, but from what Silverberg says there have been clear, major differences of opinion within Microsoft as to the direction it should take. And it looks rather like Silverberg is one of Bill Gates' victims. Get a load of this: "i [Silverberg's trademark is that his keyboard doesn't have a caps shift] simply do not want to spend my life in meetings struggling with the internal issues, getting pissy mail from billg saying the portal should be windows online so i can check my available bug fixes 10x a day, or hearing from people who want time to do unnatural and losing things to do to protect windows." Isn't Slivka the guy Bill labeled a commie, when the idea of "free forever" wasn't so cool? That was a different context, of course. Quite an entertaining story, but I'll let the Register get the hit on reading the rest of the story.

To: Harvey Allen who wrote (23967)	5/26/2000 1:10:00 AM
From: Gerald R. Lampton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Harvey, from the same WSJ article: Mr. Boies said various three-way breakup proposals were rejected because they would be inefficient, disruptive or harmful to consumers. Part of the reason behind the rejection of one form of the three-way split is the Justice Department economists' surprising conclusion that competition doesn't really work in the operating-system market anyway. Dividing the company into "three Windows clones," Mr. Boies told the judge, wouldn't be sustainable because consumers would inevitably gravitate toward a single company or standard. interactive.wsj.com Thank you, David Boies. Couldn't have said it better myself. Structural remedies will destroy Microsoft's monopoly, maybe, but they are not going to restore competition -- all they will do is make it easier to replace one monopolist with another. As for conduct remedies, the big hole in the DOJ's case all along has been causation. There's no proof that but for Microsoft's anticompetitive conduct there would be competition in the OS market, or any other market, for that matter, hence no basis for concluding that conduct remedies will result in a restoration of competition, either. Antitrust laws are not well designed to deal with natural monopoly. The remedies quandry the DOJ is facing right now (and that the court seems to want to gloss over in its rush to thwart Microsoft's delaying strategy) is the direct result of that fact. If I were Bill Gates, I think I'd be pretty ecstatic about how this case is going right now.