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

To: miraje who wrote (14665)	12/5/1997 6:10:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

Er, James, not to get in too much of the earnest civics lecture business again, but nobody in the current matter is "passing laws defining what is and is not an OS and/or application." Passing laws is the role of the legislative branch. If you want the law changed, you should write your representative. Enforcing the law is the job of the "bureaucrats" in the executive branch, most particularly the Department of Justice, and interpreting the law when its meaning is disputed is the role of the judicial branch. All three branchs do plenty of things that they don't particularly understand well, all the time, and we live with it. Rule of law, Bill has no problem using it when his lawyers have negotiated one of those special contracts Microsoft is so famous for. No problem working to get the proper laws passed either, or getting his golf partner to take care of pesky foreign policy issues for Microsoft. There are plenty of stupid juries too, we live with them also. There are also plenty of investors who think that the fact that Microsoft stock only goes up means that they have the best software, and that the peculiar place in the computer systems world that Windows represents is the inevitable Omega point of systems design, and will serve us all well through the next millenium. Others have some doubts about that. They've had experience with systems that do most of what Windows does, at least in terms of what's commonly viewed of what an OS should do by those foolish egghead CS types, but the computers run for months without crashing or rebooting. Of course, the Microsoft investors don't particularly want to hear that point of view, they'd rather hear the "truth" as proclaimed from One Microsoft Way. Oops, sorry, an earnest civics lecture and patronizing CS lecture all in one. The alternative is to repeat the prayer of the ilk from The Economist, "Oh Lord, deliver us from WIndows..." Amen. Cheers, Dan.