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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Night Writer who wrote (25470)	5/3/1998 11:56:00 PM
From: Roads End	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

As long as you are free to sign or not sign that contract you have free enterprise. Gates is not holding a gun to anyone's head is he? When the govenmental regulators start making the rules for you then you no longer have free enterprise.

To: Night Writer who wrote (25470)	5/4/1998 12:57:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

CPQ was one of the examples of this 'requirement' but in fact was one of the first companies to ship Netscape navigator on its products, and has always had some products where navigator was the default browser. At least in CPQ's case the use of either IE or Navigator has always been just a business decision. The assertion that IE is much more tightly integrated into Win98 and NT5 is not just PR. MSFT eliminated many internal tools for looking at data (including the 'windows explorer', 10 different help handlers, and several documentation viewer packages) and converted the content to be more compatible with an enhanced browser-type interface. This allowed a lot of simplification of internal code and reduced the number of different things that needed to be tested. In this environment the use of IE as an internet browser is just one way in which the new capability can be used. MSFT got tangled up in their underware trying to explain this. Yes you can remove the IE icon, and yes netscape still works fine, but that still leaves a lot of code that could be called IE code, and yes that code is needed for the navigation and help functions to work. I think MSFT is right in putting that capability into the OS as a standard component, and I hope all of the nonsense about browser wars does not obscure the good thinking that the architectural people at MSFT have done on this subject. IMO the smart thing for MSFT would be to start talking about the new capability in some other terms than 'browser', point out that the new capabilities will be part of the published APIs (so anyone can take advantage of them to build browser-like management tools, data access tools, etc.) and get on to something more productive.