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

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (19428)	5/19/1998 1:56:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

The WSJ is of course one of those "objective" sources you agree with Reggie, as opposed to all those other "biased" press people trying to sell advertising. At least on this select excerpt. The question of remedies is still fairly hypothetical, naive high school civics guy has no comment. But naive microeconomics guy still wonders how setting the market price of browsers to 0 fits in to old Adam Smith's invisible hand theory, or encourages "innovation". No fair recycling the old "Netscape was free too", or I'll really have to dig up that old Spyglass story. I'm sure the Mind of Reg(TM) has a clever answer for that, just like there's an answer for how the option rich Microsofties could stage an employee buyout if they actually had $30 billion in options, as opposed to the $90billion or so that commie rag Forbes cites them as having outstanding. Cheers, Dan.

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (19428)	5/19/1998 2:04:00 PM
From: Thure Meyer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Yeah, Its treacherous terrain all right. My personal preference is to mandate low level standards and enforce an ethical code of conduct. I keep beating on this particular point, but if we could force "open source" types of standard for word processing, spreadsheets, graphics tools, web pages, etc.., (like ethernet, IP, etc.), then the marketplace would operate efficiently. Right now its just not efficient (IMO). I'm sure you have come across this problem with MS and Intel when doing research on small software companies. An alliance with MS means a skyrocketing price irrespective of how good the technology is. The consumer only enters the picture later once the menu of choices has been printed. This is also a problem when trying to assess investment risks since even superior technology and market presence can be wiped out by MS. This is precisely what the NSCP problem was and still is. I don't really give a shit about NSCP either. In some ways its ironic that Mosaic -> Netscape -> public domain, completes the circle. Lets accept that this DOJ suit is real and try to figure out what will happen next. If we do, we will be able direct our investments and speculations more effectively. Thure