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

To: M31 who wrote (8190)	5/31/1998 3:50:00 AM
From: Dwight E. Karlsen	Respond to of 74651

Have you read a transcript of the DOJ's lawsuit? I did read the first seventeen items of the DOJ "complaint", yes, and posted items I think 7 thru 17 in a post here on this thread, with my comments inserted. Basically what I found was this: The DOJ believes that Netscape Navigator is actually a whole OS platform (that's the word used in the complaint: "platform"), and at the same time an agent for distributing Java. They believe that in the fullness of time, if Netscape's browser remained popular enough, that more and more apps would be written for Java (I guess to be run under the Navigator "platform"). Therefore; the DOJ believes that Java represents a serious threat to Microsoft, and that Microsoft is determined to therefore kill Java. So the way it looked to me, the DOJ lawsuit, going off what I saw in the Complaint, is based wholly on the promise of Java, supplanted by theory, assumptions, and in some aspects flat-out mistaken beliefs. For example, does anyone really consider Netscape Navigator to be a "platform", which doesn't need Win95, Unix, OS/2, or Linux? If there's anyone out there running just a hard disk and Netscape Navigator, let me know. Further, does it not strike you odd, M31, that the Complaint names Netscape more times than it does Microsoft? That strikes me as very odd. Like one journalist wrote in a column, the DOJ complaint reads like an industrial blueprint for the promotion of Java/Netscape. That's lame. Further, bringing up memos which say things like "We've gotta crush Navigator; we've gotta make IE better than Navigator"; I mean, who really cares? It's just competitive rhetoric. Now there may be sales practices which, though legal, would be better for consumers if Microsoft didn't practice. I refer to the "pay per machine" deals vs. pay-per-copy, whereby in pay-per-machine the customer buying MS-Office for instance gets a cheaper price per license if they buy a license for every PC they own or sell. Incidently, Microsoft says that "many" State and Federal agencies have taken advantage of the pay-per-machine or "volume discount" (that's how MS describes it) deal. Now that they've equipt all their PCs with MS-Office, the Federal DOJ claims it's against the anti-trust laws. I think that if the DOJ or the states succeed in that aspect of the State lawsuit, then all those state and federal agencies should be required to pay MS the difference between the "volume discount" price and the regular per-machine-actually-installed price. DK