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

To: Gersh Avery who wrote (7911)	5/23/1998 9:32:00 PM
From: MR. PANAMA (I am a PLAYER)	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Dear MR GATES and MSFT... I do not want to see NSCP as part of your package in future computers that I purchase. I feel it is totally wrong for your company to promote NSCP even if demanded by the doj. If you do then I will be forced to buy non American products...GRIM...not wanting to buy Russian or Chineese computers

To: Gersh Avery who wrote (7911)	5/23/1998 9:37:00 PM
From: MR. PANAMA (I am a PLAYER)	Respond to of 74651

I am OUT of here ...some young girl is going to get a spanking tonight ... bad doj bad doj bsd doj.....hahahahaha

To: Gersh Avery who wrote (7911)	5/23/1998 9:43:00 PM
From: Dwight E. Karlsen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Sure, Gersh. That tirade is no different than what we've been hearing from the DOJ: There is an assumption of guilt with respect to Microsoft beating Netscape. As for Either way, Microsoft has NOT heard the last of Netscape. Netscape has a billion-dollar plus antitrust claim against Microsoft and, in due course, that claim will be prosecuted. Any yokel can claim to have a multi-trillion dollar complaint, and they can support this theory with all sorts of pie-in-the-sky assumptions and theories. The bottom line: The whole DOJ/Netscape claim centers around the assumption that Microsoft has killed Java. Java proponents were sure that Java, a language "which creates programs to run on any operating system" would have killed Microsoft, if Microsoft hadn't used predatory practices to kill it off or at least derail it so that it no longer represented a "clear and present danger". The sad truth to all this hype is that Java is surprisingly weak right now. Contrary to Robert Bork's Friday May 22 WSJ column, in which he falsely stated that Java runs on any OS, there is in fact no Java client which runs on any OS. So you see Gersh, these seemingly small but serious failings in the central premise to the DOJ/NSCP case are what will be looked at under a microscope when the case moves to trial. Further, even IF Java DOES run under any OS, it is quite speculative to say that JAVA would now be the dominant OS, if it were not for the predatory actions of Microsoft. Which leads me to my last point -- Isn't it ironic that Microsoft is being vilified for the same thing (having a popular OS) that Sun and Netscape are so desparately and transparently seeking? I wonder if our great and fair DOJ will be prosecuting Sun/Netscape, when and if JAVA supplants and renders useless the Microsoft OS. Something tells me no.

To: Gersh Avery who wrote (7911)	5/23/1998 10:39:00 PM
From: FR1	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

" The problem with Microsoft's "business model," is that it is riddled with business practices which are illegal under the antitrust laws " Information from this site is not very good. Go and read some - you will find most posts are people calling each other vulgar names, etc. It seemed to me that most of the conversations they have are talking about how MSFT will be fined for crimes that do not exist. In other words, they assume MSFT will be punished severely for shipping Win98 later in the year. There is no crime in shipping Win98 right now (which MSFT is doing big time). Otherwise there would be a court injunction. The other thing people go wild over is the constant chatter (for decades now) about how somebody is just waiting to clobber MSFT for patent or copyright infringement. Any day now for billions of dollars! Yeah, sure. MSFT has a army of lawyers and it is doubtful they have missed something enormous. How come all these people have not hammered MSFT a long time ago? I guess next comes the conspiracy theory on how the CIA is in there messing up the whole works. Get real.

To: Gersh Avery who wrote (7911)	5/24/1998 5:41:00 PM
From: Mick Mørmøny	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

How to Break Up Microsoft By MICHAEL M. WEINSTEIN Stacked against the landmark antitrust cases of the past, the actions taken by the Justice Department against Microsoft last week are pint-sized. The behemoth Standard Oil Co. was broken up more than 80 years ago into 34 refining companies, pipelines and other pieces. AT&T was broken up into one long-distance company and seven regional phone companies. The government spent 13 years trying to dismantle IBM before dropping the effort in 1982 out of exhaustion. All the government wanted from Microsoft last week was less heavy-handed behavior. According to the Justice Department, Microsoft exploits its monopoly of Windows, the operating system that runs about 90 percent of the nation's personal computers, to dominate sales of many other products and services. As proof, the government points to contracts that Microsoft has with computer manufacturers and companies selling services over the Internet that prevent them from steering customers to Microsoft's competitors. These and other exclusionary practices, all based on the dependence of Microsoft's partners on Windows, make it likely that Microsoft will dominate the market for browsers -- the software that connects personal computers to the Internet -- and maybe even the markets for real estate, travel and other commercial services available online. Nobody at the Justice Department is openly talking about breaking up Microsoft -- yet. But many analysts predict that Microsoft's chokehold on cyberspace will tighten, and that the government will respond by trying to restructure Microsoft to weaken its ability to block competition, rather than by subjecting every move by Bill Gates to judicial challenge. Economists are already thinking hard about feasible ways for the government to take bold action. The government's suit seeks to prohibit Microsoft's exclusionary practices. But many analysts are skeptical that a monopoly backed by the power of Windows can be sidetracked by behavioral pinpricks. If the skeptics are right, Microsoft's commercial tentacles could grow to gargantuan length -- grasping new technologies for transmitting movies and other video data over the Internet, for example. At that point, Microsoft's economic muscle could make that of the old AT&T look puny by comparison, and Justice will be compelled to revisit the trust-busting tactics of yesteryear. But trust-busters would get little guidance from the breakups of Standard Oil, AT&T and, more recently, electrical utilities. Standard Oil controlled oil wells, refineries and pipelines. AT&T controlled the only phone wires running into Americans' homes. Electrical utilities owned the only transmission lines. Those monopolies flowed from easily identified physical assets that could be split off from the rest of a company and regulated separately. But Microsoft owns nothing much more than the 0's and 1's of its computer code. Worse still for would-be trust-busters, those 0's and 1's are constantly changing. The phone and transmission lines running into Americans' homes don't change very much from one year to the next. But Microsoft transforms Windows frequently, which raises the question: what exactly is Windows? A central tenet of the government's complaint is that Microsoft demolishes competition for application programs, like programs that reorganize data on disk drives, by incorporating them into Windows, while rivals must sell them as stand-alone applications. A few years back, Windows did not include a browser. Now it does, and the sales of browsers by Microsoft's major competitor are shriveling. If the government cannot define Windows, it cannot easily split Microsoft's operating system from its applications software -- the antitrust equivalent of separating local phone lines from AT&T. A few economists have given the Microsoft problem serious thought, however, and come up with intriguing suggestions. Frederic Scherer of Harvard proposes a tactic the government once used against Xerox: compulsory licensing. Xerox was required in the 1970s to license patents for paper-feeding and other technical knowhow to would-be competitors in order to break its monopoly in copy machines. Scherer would require Microsoft to sell to any willing buyer, for a fee determined by the government, the right to modify and market the Windows operating system. The idea is to clone Microsoft. Each licensee could choose its own browser, develop its own Web sites or advertise the Web sites of any other company. This would inject competition where virtually none now exists. But Scherer's plan does pose a danger. If the licensees modified Windows too much, they would destroy the compatibility and efficiency of the existing system that exists thanks to the standard set by Microsoft that every computer program follows. To address this danger, Scherer proposes an industry committee to limit modifications of Windows. Garth Saloner of Stanford University offers a less regulated version of Scherer's plan, in which the government would neither set standards nor set fees. He would split Microsoft into a company that sells Windows and a company that sells word-processing and other applications. Microsoft would have to auction off to the two or three highest bidders the source code behind Windows. The winning bidders would be free to modify their version of Windows in any way they think their customers would want. The clones could also develop word processing and other applications in competition with Microsoft. Saloner stops short of proposing a czar to oversee industry standards because, he predicts, his Microsoft clones would not risk driving away customers by peddling an operating system that is incompatible with their large inventories of Windows-based software. Saloner could imagine, for example, that Sun Microsystems would bid for the right to sell a version of Windows that would offer customers a non-Microsoft browser and also preserve compatibility with the operating system that Sun provides its corporate clients. Competition among three or four Windows-wielding firms, he argues, is enough to insure that no one company dominates cyberspace technology and commerce. So far, the threat that Microsoft will thwart competition is just that -- a threat. The American computer industry is by most accounts remarkably dynamic and creatively entrepreneurial. That in part explains why the Justice Department decided on behavioral remedies for now. But there may come a time when Microsoft's business tactics prove intolerable, threatening to concentrate economic power over Internet commerce. Yet the lawyers and economists at the Justice Department's antitrust division will no doubt hesitate to take bold action. The 13-year IBM quagmire looms over trust-busting adventures just as the Vietnam quagmire looms over military adventures. The importance of the Scherer and Saloner plans lies less in their details, which are incomplete, than in the fact that they provide a blueprint should Justice decide that trust-busting cannot remain a relic of the past.