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

To: Yaacov who wrote (45574)	5/28/2000 6:31:00 PM
From: SunSpot	Respond to of 74651

Where were we before DOS and Windows, you ask... it really brought a big smile to my face... I had a CP/M machine based on a Z80A processor (4MHz), with to diskette drives with each 880KByte capacity. Graphics resolution was approx. 720x370, and a 1MByte (!) RAM disk was attached. We could read a lot of different diskette formats from different CP/M machines, which was not that usual. Then I downgraded to DOS (!) with an 8MHz IBM PC/XT compatible with two 360Kbyte diskette drives, CGA display with 620x200 resolution. Only after half a year or a year I got a 32MB Seagate ST238R RLL harddisk, and then things got better than the previous OS. The main benefit of DOS was not the OS, but the hardware compatibility, defined by IBMs hardware design. Do you remember those machines that ran MS-DOS, but weren't IBM PC hardware compatible? Completely useless. The only reason I changed was because my brother also changed from CP/M to DOS. I cannot remember why he changed, but the fact is, that I did not exchange CP/M with DOS because of technical superiority, I did it in spite of worse performance. The most funny thing is, that most things ran much slower in DOS than in CP/M, even though the processor was faster. Mostly because of the way the screen updates was handled. The first improvement in our lives provided by MSFT was the standard API for using more than 640KByte of memory: Windows 3.0. Before that, GEM was the preferred GUI and there were several memory managers available. And before Windows 3.0 there were no problems in living without MSFT technology, in fact I used DR-DOS most of the time, because I believed it was better. I changed to use MS-DOS with Windows 3.0, because I found that it was more compatible, not better.

To: Yaacov who wrote (45574)	5/28/2000 9:07:00 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

Re: but please tell me how did it hurt the public? It's not relevant to the stock price. My point was that splitting Microsoft into 2 companies will not remove its license to print money. Splitting it into 3 parts would have confused things enough to possibly slow down the juggernaut, but 2 parts is a fairly straightforward separation and won't even slow things down. The two parts will each maintain clear monopolies in their respective spaces, and be able to continue to make monopoly profits. By the way, there are many legal monopolies and a monopoly in and of itself isn't necessarily illegal. Monopoly is an economic term as well as a legal one. Any company that makes more than a market return on capital is exercising a monopoly on something pretty much by definition. A copyright or patent is a legal monopoly, as is ownership of income producing real property. If Microsoft weren't facing a breakup, it was probably facing 20+ years of scrutiny by some regulator - and that was the most likely outcome going into the trial. It could have been quite harmful. My guess is that Bill Gates has once again demonstrated his brilliance in business and political economy by instead goading Judge Jackson into a meaningless "final split" that will leave Microsoft free to continue to run its business in exactly the same manner it has for the last 2 decades - and will also get the regulators off its back. I went long Microsoft only after hearing that the most likely outcome was a split into 2 parts. IMHO, that is the most bullish possible outcome for MSFT. I've never held any Microsoft before, now I'm holding out of the money calls. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's a conclusion I'm willing to put money on. Regards, Dan