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To: Lynn who wrote (34436)	8/16/2000 9:16:07 AM
From: JDN	Respond to of 64865

Dear Lynn: Thats really incredible, for a Box company to say they prefer one ISP makes absolutely no sense to me. As a CPQ shareholder I really resent it. Sounds like you do too. JDN

To: Lynn who wrote (34436)	8/16/2000 9:27:15 AM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 64865

Lynn, JDN - Regarding CPQ's internet appliance, I think you missed the part of that announcement that said the product was jointly developed by CPQ and MSFT. The MSFT connection effectively gives them the ability to market that appliance at $100... sure, they miss a bunch of people who don't want MSN, but if you have looked at MSN's numbers lately, the flip side of the coin is that CPQ gets a huge (and at this point exclusive) market driven by $150M of MSFT advertising. This strikes me as a good way to jump-start penetration of the device and get a variety of third-party people on board without a huge investment in launch marketing from CPQ. I would expect that once the initial ramp is complete and product is moving strongly, they will open it up to other (or any) ISPs to go after the additional market. This looks like a great product to me. As far as being "too close" to MSFT, CPQ has always been a close MSFT partner, probably the closest. While this may not always have been a perfect partnership, it looks to me like it has done a lot for CPQ over the years - for example, in 1986, CPQ developed the 32 bit version of Windows for MSFT, so that CPQ would have an OS for their 386 introduction. That turned out to be a huge win. They likewise co-developed the SMP version of NT which jump-started the ProLiant line of servers and gave CPQ huge (>70%) market share in the volume server space for several years. All in all, I think that this deal is likely to be good for CPQ and I assume they will do the right things for customers going forward with regard to open access.