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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: robert b furman who wrote (49684)	7/24/2001 12:56:20 PM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

OT MSFT I'm not suggesting Microsoft expose their operating system source code. API stands for Application Programming Interface. It's the list of resources that one program can use when calling another. You don't need to know a railroad's cost structure in order to use it to ship your freight, but if the railroad won't tell you when the trains leave or what coupling its cars use, you're going to be pretty much stuck. If the railroad is the only available way to ship things, then the railroad owner can extend its monopoly to goods by refusing access anyone but internal users. That's illegal. So why should it be legal for MSFT to use preferred access to the operating system API as a way to extend its monopoly to applications? (I haven't followed the MSFT case closely, so I don't know what their defense was on this point. I believe that they simply claimed that they aren't a monopoly, so laws to prevent monopoly misbehavior like this don't apply.) Katherine