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

To: David Howe who wrote (54202)	12/14/2000 4:37:22 PM
From: Dave	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

I said, "I can't think of a single market in which MSFT has succeeded that did not somehow leverage its OS monopoly." And David Howe said, "Below I list a number of their products that I feel counter your argument." I won't go through your entire list of Microsoft's software offerings over the past few years and explain one by one how they benefit from MSFT's abuse of monopoly power because life is too short. But I'll go through it in categories... You can cross out all of the Macintosh Office software from the list because they have succeeded on the Mac simply because they are ubiquitous on Windows, and MSFT has kept their default Office file formats proprietary to prevent competition. You can cross out Internet Explorer for the Macintosh because MSFT threatened to discontinue its Mac Office software until AAPL agreed to make IE the default browser on Macintosh. You can cross out Windows NT for obvious reasons. Windows NT is successful because Windows software runs on it, and because MSFT has kept its Windows networking protocols just proprietary enough to make NT work better in Windows networks. You can cross out everything related to MSN because MSFT has made that the default ISP for their monopoly Windows OS. You can cross out Windows CE because it has been an abysmal failure. MSFT simply cannot get hardware licensees to build WinCE products without making big expensive "strategic investments." Most of the remaining products on your list are either not significant or not successful, and the rest are largely successful because MSFT offers discounts on its monopoly Windows product to those vendors who bundle MSFT's other products with their machines. Dave