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

To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (15085)	12/19/1997 1:46:00 AM
From: esecurities(tm)	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

US recruits top New York lawyer for Microsoft case WASHINGTON, Dec 19 (Reuters) - "...The U.S. Justice Department has hired New York superlawyer David Boies to help the government win its antitrust case against Microsoft Corp (Nasdaq:MSFT - news), the Washington Post reported in Friday editions. The paper said the government's decision to hire Boies signaled its determination to win its case..." &copy 1997 REUTERS biz.yahoo.com

To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (15085)	12/19/1997 8:05:00 AM
From: Reginald Middleton	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 24154

<Just out of curiosity, what is the technical rationale for what they are doing? How is it cheaper and/or better for the consumer if the two are inextricably intertwined?> Gerry, MSFT has a LOT of points in its favor throughout this entire dispute. If the DOJ wanted to bring MSFT down, they should have picked somtehing that had much more factual "meat." Sure, they can win this in the sensalitionist media, the political arena, and the "I hate MSFT techie" crowd, but when revealing the pure facts, MSFT is right. I am sure there are aspects which would have been easier to win than this one. For instance, the technical reason for doing what they are doing is anagous to the technicial reason for NSCP bundling mail clients with Navigator, to make a "whole" package that creates a smooth, ubiquitous product and experience for the end user. Most end users don't like to go hunting for the best roduct, they want to boot there machine and start using it, period. MSFT realizes this, so does NSCP. NSCP, like MSFT, never prevented anybody from using a competing product. Therefore, it is unnecessary to force them to extricate thier bundled code. If you don't like it, don't use it, period. Therefore, there is a reason to beleive that this entire ordeal is a witch hunt. The only possible reason for wanting to remove these files as an ultimatum, is to conserve an extra 10 mb of disk space (out of an average fo 4.5 Gb!). Most people are wasting more than this in lost adn wandering .TMP and .BAK files scattered throughout thier system. Do you mean to tell me that the governemet should start regulating free disk space. It is coming soon!! I know the Israeli, erupean, Indian and Asian software vendors are hoping the gov't. puts the Whammy on MSFT so they can tach the U.S. how "unconcentrated" the power in the software techology can really get.

To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (15085)	12/19/1997 9:39:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Respond to of 24154

>>>Just out of curiosity, what is the technical rationale for what they are doing? How is it cheaper and/or better for the consumer if the two are inextricably intertwined?<<< It's not better of course. Engineering wisdom for 40 years has been, and probably will always be, that modular is better. With integration through well designed APIs, Objects, and data structures, seasoned by testing and user consent. Chaz

To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (15085)	12/19/1997 11:49:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Just out of curiosity, what is the technical rationale for what they are doing? How is it cheaper and/or better for the consumer if the two are inextricably intertwined? Gerald, I think I sort of answered this in other posts, but between the flood of news and the resurgance of the forum, it's hard to pick it out. First of all, the so-call "browser integration" has nothing to do with what's good for consumers, or what's cheaper to do, or any good technical reason, and everything to do with killing Netscape. Second, as near as I can tell, the browser is still fundamentally an application, in what I'd call the conventional, non-Microsoftese sense, a user program running in user mode on the computer, making system calls as appropriate. That some of the code is buried in various dll's or in the .exe is not much of a distinction. Third, I got a hunch that the whole thing isn't quite as purposely ill designed as I thought, with things arbitrarily bundled together to make them essential. Rather, it's more like the Office/Window 3.0 co-development, where certain things were added to the so-called Win32 api as IE3/4 development went along. Microsoft is chosing to call those additions/modifications "part of integrated IE". Microsoft, of course, has its own language for many things. There's been a bunch of base Windows dll's that have evolved since the retail release, and everybody is obligated to ship the current versions if they use them. Of course, these new dll's ship with IE3/IE4 too. So, is any app that ships with up to date dll's "integrated into the OS"? Finally, the last hooker is that there are various new OS components, to do with the so-called web=like interface, that generate html, but of course special ms-enhance html, that only IE can deal with. Presumably, they haven't thrown out the old Win95 interface, so you don't actually need IE for anything, but who can say. I talked about this in 15118 here, my favorite news story was www5.zdnet.com, "Microsoft claims debunked!" It's beginning to make sense to me, and the design isn't as arbitrarily offensive as I thought, except for the line about everything new since the retail release being "part of IE". I welcome correction, of course, but I'm not particularly impressed by the "228 files in the IE distribution" business. Another good story: techweb.com, from which: Of the retail product's 228 files, some have nothing to do with IE. They are updates to pre-existing core Win 95 files, files without which the operating system simply will not run. How many? Microsoft officials will not say. They refused to identify which files relate solely to IE and not to Win 95 itself. No wonder: A Microsoft memo states, "You may not elect to install only selected portions of Internet Explorer 3.0." To reiterate, IE is packaged with an OS upgrade of sorts, as are many, many Windows apps. None of the others get to say they are "integrated with the OS", but that's life in Windows world. Like I said, if I can do it without too much pain I'm going to compare that 228 file list to what comes with Office 97. Cheers, Dan.