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

To: Thunder who wrote (56168)	2/24/2001 5:06:46 PM
From: miraje	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Oral Arguments Near in Antitrust Appeal On Monday and Tuesday, February 26 and 27, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will hear oral arguments in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust suit, a three-year-old legal dispute among the federal government, 19 states and Microsoft. Because of the high level of public interest, the court will allow a live audio broadcast of the proceedings. You can hear the oral arguments at: cadc.uscourts.gov . The Freedom to Innovate Network will send updates to FIN members following each day's proceedings, or you can check the FIN website for developments at: microsoft.com Who benefits from the government's lawsuit against Microsoft? The antitrust case against Microsoft was filed by the Department of Justice and 20 individual states (one has since dropped off the suit) after Microsoft's competitors spent more than $3 million on "Project Sherman," a lobbying campaign to persuade the Department of Justice to sue Microsoft (John Heilemann, Wired, November 2000). Subsequent comments made by Microsoft competitors have lent weight to the notion that the suit was intended to help competitors, not consumers. Sun CEO Scott McNealy, for instance, whose company footed most of the bill for Project Sherman, said after learning of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's ruling in the trial phase of the case, "Government has to come in and discipline Microsoft until the rest of the world catches up." (Washington Times, April 4, 2000). More recently, in a speech to the National Press Club (February 8), McNealy made clear that he thinks regulation should be narrowly targeted. "We don't want new regulations; we want enforcement of the current regulations. .The DOJ ought to follow it [the antitrust case] through." Another Microsoft competitor, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, weighed in recently on what consumers really want, citing "integration of Web sites with his company's powerful database software as the key to making Oracle 'the Microsoft of the Internet. Consumers have been voting heavily for integrated software for years,' Mr. Ellison said at a recent briefing." Ellison, like McNealy, was selective about who he thought should respond to this consumer demand, and how: "'The only thing Microsoft tried to integrate into Windows which it should not have is the browser,' he added" (New York Times, Feb. 19, 2001). Similarly, America OnLine signed an amicus brief filed in the antitrust matter that stated: "Microsoft crushed Netscape because it believed that the spread of browser software beyond Microsoft's control would erode the Windows monopoly.'' The brief did not mention that Netscape's 6.0 browser was widely released for Sun's Solaris operating environment the week prior to filing the brief, nor that the "crushed" Netscape, now a subsidiary of America Online Inc. (acquired in a multi-billion dollar deal made public during the course of the antitrust trial), had recently reported its number of registered users at near 34 million -- a 10 million increase since January 2000.