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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Robert Winchell who wrote (791)	4/27/1998 12:47:00 PM
From: Rusty Johnson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1600

Wall Street Journal Robert Bork Says Justice Has a Case In Antitrust Action Against Microsoft Associated Press WASHINGTON -- Former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, hired by a chief competitor to Microsoft Corp., cautioned Sunday that antitrust lawsuits by the Justice Department should be rare but that government action against Microsoft "is one of those rare cases." "Their documents ... display a clear intent to monopolize, to prevent any competition from springing up," Mr. Bork said. "And they have used a variety of restrictive practices to prevent that kind of competition." Charles "Rick" Rule, a legal consultant to Microsoft, which makes the software used on most home computers, responded that recent claims against the company "frankly don't stand up to scrutiny." Mr. Bork, who appeared on CBS's "Face the Nation," disclosed April 17 that he had been hired by Netscape Communications Corp. to lobby the Justice Department to file an antitrust case against Microsoft. Netscape's browser, Navigator, used by an estimated 60% of people on the Web, is the biggest competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Mr. Bork, a former federal judge with a conservative reputation for opposing government intervention in the marketplace, cited what he described as restrictive agreements between Microsoft and Internet-service providers that limited how the companies could promote Netscape's browser. "Only a knee-jerk conservative would say there's never a case for antitrust," said Mr. Bork, who also called Microsoft "a very good company, a great American success story." "A monopolization case ought to be a rare thing, and this is one of those rare cases." Mr. Rule, also on CBS, called the contracts "very legitimate cross-marketing agreements ... where we said, 'If we refer customers to you, you can't switch them to competitors.' " But he noted that Microsoft had already, under intense scrutiny by the Justice Department, announced changes in those contracts to make them less restrictive. Mr. Bork said Justice lawyers have an antitrust case "cold" against Microsoft under the federal Sherman Act: "You have the monopoly. You have the expressed intent to stifle competition, you have the practices that are not necessary for consumers but to crush rivals." But Mr. Bork was vague when he discussed possible solutions to diluting Microsoft's power in the marketplace. Critics contend the company has too much influence in the industry because it also designs the Windows operating system for the vast majority of personal computers. "I wouldn't say break up the company," he said. "They ought to ban these restrictive practices. Beyond that, you have to have a lot of thinking to do yet." Microsoft, which is also under investigation by more than a dozen state attorneys general, is preparing to release its next version of its operating system, Windows 98, to computer makers in mid-May and to retailers June 25. Mr. Rule said there are no plans to remove Internet Explorer in any way from Windows 98. "If computer manufacturers want to put Netscape's browser on there, too, they still can do it," he said, "as they have in the past and can in the future."

To: Robert Winchell who wrote (791)	4/27/1998 1:22:00 PM
From: Dragonfly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1600

That whole quote is absurd. What "technical information needed to write software that runs on Windows" is not available to anybody off the street? Actually, quite a lot. I had occassion to do some TAPI programming recently and discovered that it is pretty much undocumented. This summer, three years after Tapi 1.4, a good book is coming out on the subject, but everything out there now is a parrot of the MS developer docs which are quite thin. Very thin. When you get higher up, it gets worse. For instance, if you were a browser maker and you wanted to allow people to use YOUR browser instead of internet explorer in Windows 98, how would you do this without microsoft's cooperation? The threat here is, 98 ships and has IE integrated. You don't submit, and you can't compete, because only we know the APIs that allow the integration of IE in the core OS. I can promise you that you won't find a book covering that subject! Dragonfly