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

To: Neil Booth who wrote (3758)	10/23/1997 10:05:00 AM
From: Jay R. Kellett	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

I think that it is going to come down to a legal test, for which IE4 will either pass or fail. There was no test in the agreement I read, so shame on DOJ for leaving a big wide-open gap. For Microsoft, they will surely want a test along the lines of "If it ships with the Operating System, it is part of the Operating System" But I expect that the DOJ will want to the test to be more along the lines of "Software that creates interaction with the user, hardware, and other software is the Operating System. Software that will be needed, through the course of ownership of an Operating System, to perform maintainence, are Operating System Utilities. --Need defined as 'usefulness of OS is degraded without said software'." Notice that under the above test IE4 does not classify as either part of the Operating System, or Operating System Utility. MS's defense that they include "other software packages with the OS like scandisk, defrag,filemanager" IS covered as part of this test -- they are all OS Utilities, and could be allowed. Windows'95, due to its size and other factors not only uses a hard drive, but NEEDS a hard drive. The ability to save, and later locate files on a hard drive is therefore part of the OS, in fact remember that DOS, the forefather of Windows stands for Disk Operating System. Under the course of ownership of a Windows machine, there is no use for IE4. It is only when a user wants to hook up to the Internet, that IE4 would be useful, and it would have an APPLICATION. Also notice that under the above definition of OS that certian other things would not be considered part of the OS. Most important is Exchange, MS's strike at Lotus Notes, which MS also considers part of the OS. Do you think that Lotus/IBM is waiting in the wings for its turn? I do. Also, if IE is part of the Windows'95 OS, why does it ship for other OS's (Mac's)? JK