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

To: Monty Lenard who wrote (6700)	5/7/1998 10:42:00 PM
From: Tweaker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Load Whitehouse.com in your browzer and tell slick you want your WIN98.

To: Monty Lenard who wrote (6700)	5/7/1998 11:11:00 PM
From: MIKE REDDERT	Respond to of 74651

The Netscape Browser will be deleted from my harddrive today. Netscape controls about 60% of the browser market, yet they still felt compelled to participate in the neutralization of a competitor thru government action. I emailed Netscape to that effect. Mike

To: Monty Lenard who wrote (6700)	5/8/1998 2:41:00 AM
From: mozek	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 74651

Monty, Your post (and letter) reaffirms my faith in the intelligence and memory of some citizens of this country. I must first say that I work for Microsoft, but my views are absolutely my own. It seems that most people have forgotten the incredible drop in software prices and increase of availability over the past 15 years. It certainly wasn't due to Apple, IBM, or Sun. I'm not saying it was all due to Microsoft, but I'd say Borland and Microsoft were the pioneers in the area of reasonably priced software. Netscape may not have been a promoter of incredibly overpriced software (they started out with a free browser as well), but their original plan, as stated by Marc Andreesen, was to "own" the platform market and relegate Win95 to a bunch of "partially debugged device drivers". They had a sign hanging on their ceiling, put there by mgmt that said "Kill Microsoft". They were quite ruthless in their competition and still have 60% market share in their major market segment. When they had 95% share, they used that dominance to drive standards and penetrate the web server market. Now that they are losing share in a market they developed by giving away free software themselves, they are paying for government intervention. I'm sure that their hiring Dole and Bork as spokesmodels won't help that truth come out. I am honestly amazed that more people in the USA are not up in arms about the Government's plan to save consumers from more integrated, less expensive software. The current Government action includes a requirement that Microsoft not integrate any features that could be considered to have a market of their own into existing products. If this requirement was around a few years ago, we wouldn't have integrated spell-checking or Thesaurus in Word, disk caching (one of the pre-Win95 disk cache products was my own) in Windows, or many features of Windows 95, including plug-n-play. Of course, one company could probably provide plug-in or ActiveX style interfaces for a few conforming, separately sold products to integrate. My opinion is that truly deep integration of many features we take for granted today would, most likely, not be available at any price. Of course, we wouldn't expect that kind of functionality so maybe we wouldn't miss it. Makes me wonder what we'll miss if the current DOJ plans succeed. I work on some new technologies which aren't yet available. I am incredibly positive about their potential to really benefit developers and users, and I honestly think the DOJ is as far off base on this action as anyone could be. No one I work with is motivated or directed to do anything less than build the best software possible. The current situation would be absolutely comical if it weren't so pathetic. I just hope that the DOJ doesn't succeed in actually damaging Microsoft's ability to build and improve excellent products. While this post may sound like a company line, it really is simply my honest opinion. Mike