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

To: dumbmoney who wrote (7955)	5/24/1998 10:50:00 PM
From: Dwight E. Karlsen	Respond to of 74651

That's absolutely right - either MSFT is charging too much, or too little. The government would look awfully silly requesting that MSFT include the browser in an add-on "Plus!"-type pack, for which it will charge extra. Yet I've heard that suggested by some arm-chair "expert". That's supposed to be good for consumers? And yet, like you say has happened, I've heard one MSFT critic saying that the Plus! pack for Win95 was an example of monopoly power being used to pry more money out of customers. This whole suit is plainly about two things only - Netscape's failure and Microsoft's success. Somehow it's Microsoft's fault when any two-bit wanna-be software co goes belly-up.

To: dumbmoney who wrote (7955)	5/25/1998 12:15:00 AM
From: Logos	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

Re: It's very funny - depending on which Microsoft critic you talk to, Microsoft is either guilty of charging too much, or charging too little. Well, it's got to be one or the other, right? Antitrust "theory" is very flexible - basically anything Microsoft does is evidence of guilt. Actually, you can set up a model where Microsoft charges too much and too little. The idea being that it charges too much for the stuff it has no competition to and too little where there is competition, to crush that competition, so that it can later charge too much in this area. This was the same thing people accused the Japanese car makers of doing, charging too much in Japan where they faced virtually no foreign competition and using those profits to dump in the US market. In Microsoft's case, I think the model would be: Microsoft over-charges for the OS itself so it could give away the browser for free. I'm not saying that Microsoft does or does not do this, just that it is possible to set up an appropriate model. Haz