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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (14204)	11/18/1997 1:52:00 AM
From: Gerald R. Lampton	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

>That was all this big Potemkin village effort when Bill >really had his eye on the ball all the time. Sure. Tell it to the judge. You are missing the point. The issue is not what Microsoft knew about its ultimate Internet Explorer plans in 1994, but what the DOJ knew about Microsft's plans throughout the course of the negotiations and whether Microsoft and DOJ intended for the Consent Decree to apply at all to prohibit Microsoft from implementing its evolving internet strategy, including bundling IE with Windows. And I do not mean to say that Microsoft "got" the net (to this day, I still think it doesn't). The article you quote from is a good one, but let's look at it from the other side: the article actually supports, rather than undermines, the thesis that Microsoft was already developing its internet strategy by the time the Consent Decree was signed. It's also probably very incomplete. We know what Myhrvold was saying in the quoted parts of these memos. We don't know what other memos there were from him or what others at Microsoft were saying and, more importantly, doing. But even this article shows that, by February 1994, four months before the Consent Decree was signed, at least one employee at Microsoft, the guy who went to Cornell, was telling them to get off their a--es and do something about the net. By April of 1994, about three months before the Decree, Gates was telling his lieutenants to put more money and energy into the net. Judge Stanley Sporkin rejected the Decree in February 1995. The article says nothing about what Microsoft was doing in this time-frame, but, by June 16, 1995, when the Court of Appeals reversed Sporkin, Gates had already issued his memo warning that the internet was the single most important development since the PC (May) and the Red Lion Summit had taken place (June). In the July to November 1995 time frame (query: when did Microsoft license Mosaic?), we have Nathan telling Bill his prophecies about how the net was going to change the economy, taking a devil's advocate position that the net was too hyped (what were the hypsters inside Microsoft saying and doing?), all leading up to the famous December 7 1995 Pearl Harbor speech by Gates. No one can seriously doubt that DOJ knew what Microsoft's plans were by then. Maybe Microsoft carried on a massive cover-up, but I would guess that, after 4 years of depositions and document productions, DOJ probably knew in July 1994 almost as much as Microsoft did about Microsoft's plans for the internet. And, I would guess that they kept themselves apprised of developments right on through the December 1995 time frame when Microsoft publicly announced its intention to give away IE. And, let's not forget about MSN, which DOJ was investigating throughout this timeframe. MSN is not the internet, I know, but they are certainly related (for starters, there is an eeiry similarity between bundling of IE and Windows and the MSN "desktop icon" controversy), and technology for one could be used for the other. We heard plenty at the time about how much the Internet changed MSN (Nathan saying at one point that the Internet could "transport" MSN, Chairman Bill saying MSN would be "part of" the internet at another), but not much has been said about what, if any, MSN technologies wound up in Microsoft's internet products. You can't pick a single point in time and say, "Microsoft didn't even have a web browser by then, so they could not have intented to exclude it from the Decree." You have to look at the totality of expressions of intent and conduct of the parties over the course of the negotiation and implementation of the agreement. And, what we have here is a DOJ that probably knew all about Microsoft's internet plans (and probably much more about them than what's in this article) and yet that said not a peep as far as I can tell to indicate that they thought the Consent Decree applied to Microsoft's evolving internet business strategy, which strategy culminated in the decision to bundle IE with Windows in the short run and integrate them in the long run. Obviously, we do not know all there is to know on this subject, and more will doubtless come out in the next several months. However, with the exception of a single interview in the San Jose Mercury News, I have yet to see any clear, let alone convincing, evidence that the people who were at the DOJ when the Consent Decree was negotiated and involved in that process think that the Decree prohibits Microsoft from bundling IE with Windows 95. Maybe you know of some I don't.