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

To: Dinesh who wrote (59313)	7/2/2001 12:12:53 PM
From: Dave	Respond to of 74651

Dinesh, Real does indeed make its APIs public so that anybody can write Real players. But to get those APIs, you have to sign an agreement that gives them the right to revoke the license from you if they decide that your product is strategically unattractive to them. But it's an irrelevant tangent to the MSFT case, even as an analogy. Real doesn't hold a monopoly. They are allowed to have onerous licensing agreements. They are allowed to try to gain a monopoly in streaming using those onerous agreements. MSFT is allowed to set up unfair terms for its own Windows Media Player SDK too, if it wants to. What is illegal is leveraging its Windows monopoly power to try to monopolize a new market. As a monopoly holder, MSFT is required to be very careful to avoid using its monopoly to prevent competition in other fields, like media streaming. Krugman had it right. Yes, he does apparently think Real is an AOL product, and that's a mistake. It doesn't mean he is, as you said, an arrogant, non-thinking man. The general gist of his article was dead on, if not every detail. Dave