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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: William E Hodal who wrote (6694)	5/8/1998 2:07:00 AM
From: Gerald Walls	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

"You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle - and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world:" "I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine". JOHN GALT Is Microsoft the modern equivalent of Rearden Steel? Is the Department of Justice (sic) trying to implement the Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule? Who is John Galt, indeed. I was trying to find D'Anconia's speech about the virtues of money. Does anyone have the part and chapter in which it appears?

To: William E Hodal who wrote (6694)	5/8/1998 4:17:00 AM
From: Shaquapa	Respond to of 74651

We became the greatest nation on the planet because the citizenry had the freedom to pursue their dreams. They didn't have to worry about the government punishing them for achievement, nor regulating them out of business. They knew that they weren't gauranteed success, but by God, if they worked at it hard or long enough they had a great chance. They also didn't depend on anyone to save them from themselves. If you talk to the "masses" today you'll find that most of them think there has been an income tax since the revolutionary war (not even close), that entitlement programs were always a government mandate (wrong again, there were no "safety nets" during most of the depression and people seemed to survive). By continuing entitlements we are robbing the people who receive it the CHANCE at excellence. By over taxing and over regulating achievement, we will ultimately rob society of the producers. "I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine". JOHN GALT

To: William E Hodal who wrote (6694)	5/8/1998 9:36:00 AM
From: Punko	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

Thanks for the link. I'll spread it to other threads - the threads for companies that Microsoft is actively trying to destroy. Internally, Microsoft contemptously refers to them as "NOISE": Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and everybody else. Who is John Galt, my ass! Ayn Rand would puke over the license you people are taking with her work. John Galt developed something from scratch and without peer. He was not out to squelch anybody else's progress. Microsoft has borrowed (and that is being polite) the pieces of its empire and pieced them together effectively. They deserve credit for flawless execution and taking advantage of their competitors' miscues. But to imply that Microsoft is an indespensible innovator is a huge stretch. A fair take on Microsoft the "innovator" comes from Sybase's Mitch Kertzman: crn.com If you look at Microsoft's successes over the years they have been rarely done by innovation. They bought DOS, they copied effectively a lot of what was in the Macintosh into Windows. In fact Windows has gotten to look a lot more like that in 95 and 98.Windows NT is basically being built by the guy that built the VAX/VMS operating system. It is an Intel-based implementation of VMS. So where is the innovation? The innovation is the talking paper clip in Microsoft Office. Is that real innovation? Kertzman didn't mention SQL Server's Sybase heritage and now with SQL Server 7, its IBM DB2 roots. And their programming tools' Borland lineage!! The only difference between Microsoft and Computer Associates is that CA buys entire companies, whereas Microsoft is too cheap to do that. Microsoft just buys their competitors' best people or it "borrows" their best ideas. Microsoft is not an innovator, not a technology company. Microsoft is a monopoly defense and expansion organization that is putting a drag on the progress of software technology by seeking out and destroying incentive to develop anything that remotely threatens their monopoly. Out of one side of your mouth you say that it's ok for Microsoft to give away IE and stuff it down everyone's throats, yet from the other side, you vigorously defend Microsoft's practice of trying to illegally subvert free, open and arguably superior competitive technologies such as Linux, Java, and CORBA. WHAT HYPOCRISY!!! The John Galts of the world do not work at Microsoft; in fact, Microsoft is out to destroy them. You people just don't get it!! Microsoft is out to become another government organization, only it's a worldwide government: The Worldwide Department of Software, complete with a tax collection agency. You want a computer? Pay the Bill Gates tax. Want to get something over the internet? Pay the Bill Gates tax. A breakup of this insidious company is something that must be explored. The OS unit would be forced to compete on a more equal footing with other OS's such as Linux, Rhapsody, Netware, etc., which are much better suited for many tasks than NT can ever be. The Apps Unit would find itself without the benefits it had enjoyed in the past...such as instant market share for subpar version 1.0 products, as well as a healthy supply of seed money from the OS cash cow to finance predatory practices such as dumping and personnel stealing. Consumers and corporate decision makers would be more inclined to buy the best OS for the job as opposed to the OS they're told to buy by their computer companies, who are told to install Windows by Microsoft. It would be a huge boost to open standards network computing, which is without a doubt the paradigm of the future. But most important, the biggest winner would be free enterprise (unlike what the Microsoft Marketing Machine is spewing) since the cost of entry would be reduced by Java's universality and deployment benefits and the likelihood of making and sustaining a profit would be greatly increased with Microsoft unable to coopt and then dump on the market any more promising technologies it wants to gain control of or take out of the picture. Who is John Galt. CERTAINLY NOT BILL GATES!!

To: William E Hodal who wrote (6694)	5/8/1998 2:25:00 PM
From: Hal Rubel	Respond to of 74651

RE: "I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine". J. Galt Apparent Contradiction: Why should I or anyone else live and toil for the sake of Microsoft? Comment: John Galt is an imaginary figure. ( I've read the book.) John Galt would oppose from his very core most of Bill Gates assertions of economic self primacy over others. Where does Bill Gates end and we begin? Economic social justice is about everybody having an equal start, not in rigging a fixed ending based on past efforts. John Galt would support a free market, not an avalanche of accumulated privileges (which many fear leads to a stratified class based society). I must say, John Galt would have been appalled at having to use the DOJ to achieve his ideal. Moral suasion, especially by example, would be truer to his nature. John Galt for economic power by any means? I think not. Not if "power is a weed growing in an empty mind". The money? Yes. But only to keep score of the rewards of economic virtue. John Galt would be dismayed by any score in a rigged game. John Galt was the model honest man. Honesty begins by taking an honest look at oneself and ones motives. Peace of mind follows. By any of the DOJ's assertions, Bill Gates must be a restless soul and unworthy of comparison to John Galt. HR PS: IMHO, the Microsoft situation is an economic rather than a moral situation. It's been in plain view to honest observers for quite some time. The possible solutions are just now coming into commercial focus as we sort out what facts there are. No matter what we decide as a society, the most important factor is that we even looked at it at all. Happy Investing. HR