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

To: Bearded One who wrote (3983)	11/11/1997 5:38:00 PM
From: ericneu	Respond to of 74651

> With your proposed interpretation, Microsoft could sell Office seperately, sell Windows seperately, and integrate Office with Windows in other cases, making the consent agreement completely worthless. First, as to "making the consent agreement completely worthless", remember that the consent decree covered multiple issues. Integration of products wasn't the main issue - the issue of licensing products on a "per CPU" basis was the primary focus. Secondly, maybe we need to define the word "integrated". According to Webster's, it means "combined", "united", or "incorporated into". I would think that we could agree that Win95 coming with IE in the box counts as "combined", at the very least. If so, then that qualifies as OK under the consent decree. It seems to me that the real issue here is that the DOJ wants to accuse Microsoft of violating anti-trust law. If that's what they're after, fine. They should do so. What they're doing now strikes me as an effort to shortcut the process, because it's easier to charge a violation of an exisiting consent decree than open a new investigation.