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To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (18489)	4/15/1998 11:36:00 AM
From: Gerald R. Lampton	Respond to of 24154

My goodness, a calm, diatribe-free post from Regimond! In that spirit, here is my calm, diatribe-free response to your questions: How would you propose they break the company up? If you go back and read my posts, you will see my thinking on this. But, in reality, I think it should be up to Microsoft to decide the best way to do it, with two preconditions: 1. The sibling companies should be numerous enough and positioned in such a manner as to insure competition in the underlying "monopolized" market; and 2. To insure that barriers to entry to the presently monopolized market are low enough so that potential and actual competition will keep prices efficient, all of the offspring companies should have full access to and the right to use all of the intellectual property that belongs to Microsoft on the date of the breakup and the right to compete in any markets they wish. I doubt there is precedence to support this action, am I wrong? I have not done exhaustive research on this, as my day job keeps me from having the time. But the AT&T divestiture comes to mind. If I am right, who decides if and how the company is broken up [?] Ideally, Microsoft should decide, subject, I suppose, to a government veto. But there is no reason Microsoft could not do this on its own and then simply go back to court and get all the Consent Decrees, prohibitions, injunctions and stays imposed to date lifted, putting the government in the position of having to respond effectively and explain why Microsoft still needs to be regulated. and what plausible jsutification can be used? I'm not sure I understand this question. However, the antitrust justification is that it removes the intellectual justification for ongoing government regulation. The marketing, competitive and investment justification is that it unlocks the potential of the company and allows for maximization of shareholder value. The internal corporate justification is that it preserves what made Microsoft great in the first place: its entreprenuerial corporate culture and the freedom of its people to innovate and market their products the way they want, aggressively and competitively. The most important question is - what do you do if the spearated parts of the company quickly rise to dominate thier respective industries (which is what I relly think would happen)? I do not think this would happen right away because the common possession by all of Microsoft's intellectual property would keep barriers to entry low enough in the beginning to make competition in the OS market a genuine threat, if not an actual reality. I also agree with Microsoft that what constitutes an "OS" or an "application" is constantly evolving and should continue to do so. So, whatever markets the offspring come to dominate will probably have little resemblance to the markets Microsoft dominates today. Will it happen in the future? It's possible. But I think that's a problem for the next generation of antitrust lawyers. Who knows: it may happen just as we enter a new conservative cycle, and Ronald Reagan's ideological heir might decide to do nothing, with the full concurrence of the Antitrust bar. Do you set up a commission to break up the micro sections of Microsoft every time they reach x% marketshare or accumulate xx% enemies? No.