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

To: nommedeguerre who wrote (18539)	4/16/1998 8:29:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Respond to of 24154

> Its not like the Year 2000 was something that came out of nowhere and caught everyone by surprise.< Say, doesn't this make a great compelling upgrade story. Lots of MSFT $. Great timing for the breakup too, with every split company getting at least one guarenteed upgrade cycle of income. >Corporate America cannot even decide on a browser interface standard< Before government intervention, corporate America had several dozen railroad track standards, hundreds of screw and pipe thread standards, half a dozen AC current standards ( plus several DC voltages), plus more recently several dozen networking protocols. Hundreds, if you look at details. It is in the nature of business to want to shut out possible competitors, and so standards will always differ if left up to the businesses. This has been true since the collapse of the guild system. We had non-standard everything under the sun, including hundreds of kinds of money! What a ton was and what a pound was varied, until the French government came up with the metric system and embarassed everyone else into having standard measures. In summary, the last 250 years of government intervention in technology standards has been a roaring success, and we would still be stuck in the 19th century, hand crafting every machine, without it. Where it has failed is mainly where lobbyists of private pleaders have gotten politicians to short-circuit the process. For instance, when Ronald Reagan heeded the auto makers and stopped the planned metric conversion of 1983. Thus guarenteeing that American cars along with hundreds of other products would be a rare purchase for years to come outside North America. Cheers, Chaz