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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BDR who wrote (32156)	9/23/2000 3:03:40 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 54805

ignore the political class at your peril. My own problem with getting in to a political discussion on this board is not that I think that politics has no impact ... obviously it does ... but that most political discussions are so content free. Each side has its own perspective and contends that it represents Truth, with or without any actual historical justification for that contention, and so one tends to get formulaic spouting which delivers no new insight. We get repetitions of "if party X gets in, Y will happen" and Y is either some bit of ill-founded scaremongering or something obvious, where those in favor of party X think it is a good think and those from party Z think it bad. And when the discussion is over, no one thinks any differently than they did at the outset. Take the bit about MSFT, which by the by doesn't actually seem to be a topic which any of the candidates are discussing, so it is rather speculative that there would be any difference in the conduct of that case under either administration. Now that the facts are pretty much on the table, the world seems divided into three camps -- those who think MSFT was naughty and should be punished, those who think that this represents a horrid intrusion by government into free enterprise, and those who really couldn't care either way as long as nothing bad happens to them personally. Short of the judgement being totally overturned, I think we can expect that companies will proceed a bit more cautiously in the exercise of monopolistic power (gorillas with ethics), but I find it hard to believe that anyone thinks that this will equate with a wholesale attach on all large business and all market leaders (all gorillas are targets). More to the point, perhaps, none of the proposed remedies will have significant impact on the power which we as gorilla watchers know they can exert because of their position, without doing anything illegal, and that if there is a serious threat to MSFT it will come not from some government shackles, but from MSFT itself failing to meet the on-going challenges of a developing industry, coming to the ends of all its tornadoes, settling in to main street complacency, and not participating in a new tornado which will ultimate displace them. I fail to see how most political discussions throw any further light on that perspective ... heat, perhaps, but not light.