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

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (8245)	6/2/1998 9:37:00 PM
From: Captain Jack	Respond to of 74651

cheryl---- I agree with your analysis and statements. Windows is the greatest thing to happen to computers and may never be overtaken. The systematic elimination of competition will hurt the entire product in the long run. Without browser competition there is no need for MSFT to make a better product, and concerning browsers they still have a long way to go to be better than NSCP. If not for NSCP what would the quality of IE be today?? It would probably be called ICrap. The competition is what made their products after Windows as they have the OS that nearly everyone uses and must use if compatability with the world is desired. Windows 95 is not perfect and 98 will never be either but only so many $$$ can be made from the OS that is now the standard so other areas must be explored to add revenue and profit -- but MSFT does have the talent and $$$ to invent new needed applications without eliminating competition in an area that should not be used to produce much revenue anyway. JR

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (8245)	6/2/1998 9:57:00 PM
From: Scotsman	Respond to of 74651

A very nice precise post. Non emotional and detached. On a seperate note, there has been some discussion about MSFT aquiring new companies in other areas to expand into cable and such. I am not too sure if this is going to take place while the DOJ is nosing around. Certainly the FTC is going to be looking very closely at anyting MSFT buys, and I would have to think that if there is even the hint of moving in to dominate a particular area, the FTC will block it.

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (8245)	6/2/1998 10:05:00 PM
From: Dwight E. Karlsen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Cheryl, Hal, Scotsman; thanks for your comments. I have a bunch of work to do tonight, so won't be able to respond in detail to all of you. One comment though (or question rather) to Cheryl, re Assuming that MSFT had marketed MS-DOS on their own, proprietary Microcomputers (ala Apple), I don't see how anyone could complain about anti-trust (given the current complaints). They could have integrated any pieces into the OS & sold the it bundled with pastrami, if they wanted. But isn't that one of things the DOJ got hot-to-trot about re IBM anti-trust lawsuit? Maybe I'm wrong, but I have the idea that at the time of the design of the original IBM PC/XT, IBM had the DOJ on their back. My guess is that the DOJ was applauding the deal whereby Microsoft would write the OS and sell it to IBM, therefore IBM wouldn't be inclined to have another dominating and all-encompassing product with the IBM PC/XT. I think the reason why Apple gets away with being the sole provider of their hardware and OS is because Apple never got big enough or market-dominating enough to fall in the scope of the DOJ radar. Something tells me that even if MSFT had marketed MS-DOS on their own, open architecture Microcomputers (Not ala Apple), the DOJ would have broken up MS probably shortly after Win 95 debuted. If the system had been proprietary ala Apple, I think MS probably would have been broken up by the DOJ shortly after Win 3.1 debuted, with vehement and righteous anger. Or at the very least, been forced to publish all HW and SW architectures. I'm neither a SW developer or a HW developer, but it appears to me tht the DOJ uses market share along with overall size of the company when determining whether or not a company is ripe for trust-busting. IBM was a HW and SW vendor, and still is. But their particular crime was that they dominated the mainframe market with proprietary HW and OS. They simply got too big for the government's comfort level. After all, who cares how proprietary the NeXt computer was: Who's buying it? So the DOJ didn't care about NeXt. But MS, they have only dabbled in HW, making things like mice, trackballs, keyboards and joysticks; "small" stuff. If MS were to merge now with Intel, you can bet the DOJ would be apoplectic. If MS had merged with Intel ten years ago, they would been busted up over five years ago, IMO. Just my observations/speculations.

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (8245)	6/3/1998 1:13:00 AM
From: mozek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Cheryl, Although in your words from a previous post, I'm one of the "tweezerheads" from Redmond, I do appreciate your attempt to appear unbiased. I'd like to respond to a few statements you made in the interest of promoting balanced discussion. Assuming that MSFT had marketed MS-DOS on their own, proprietary Microcomputers (ala Apple), I don't see how anyone could complain about anti-trust (given the current complaints). They could have integrated any pieces into the OS & sold the it bundled with pastrami, if they wanted. It's interesting that you believe if only Microsoft sold the hardware in addition to the OS that runs it (like your employer, Sun) then, and only then, should all be forgiven. I wonder how that level of additional bundling would have enhanced the innovation that's occurred in the PC industry, the same innovation which is threatening Sun's overpriced server business with high-powered, inexpensive hardware and software. They [Microsoft] had a tendency to keep the OS specs closed. I belonged to an informal coterie of determined hackers who uncovered the "mysteries" of MS-DOS & tried to inform the public (pretty much a waste of time). ... Now, however, they have more ways of locking out a competitor than just manipulating the api's that they publish. Interesting. I also reverse engineered a great deal of MS-DOS and wrote a multitasking system that was used by a major shipping company to operate a 3270 emulator along with a handheld device package tracking system. The multitasking system was also used by a large number of end users. In all of my reverse engineering, I never found undocumented APIs that were exploited by Microsoft applications to some great advantage. Since that time, I worked on Win95. I can assure you that it was our strict policy to document all APIs that could be useful to applications, Microsoft or otherwise. The only ones we did not document were used by system components, may have needed modification in later OS versions, and were sometimes potentially destabilizing to applications that used them (not so with system components). If some application used these APIs, it was not due to any concerted "lockout" attempt by Microsoft. Usually, I consider the "undocumented API" complaint to be an excuse for those who can't compete on application functionality alone. Since you were a member of this informal coterie, I'd be interested to hear of any API you found that was exploited by a Microsoft application to the detriment of its competition. This would require MSFT to publish the OS specs to everyone, the way Java is published. Windows API specifications are better documented than any comprehensive API of which I'm aware. In addition, there are an incredible number of 3rd party texts on Windows and its APIs. If Microsoft published specs the way Sun published Java's, then anyone who read them would be at risk of being sued. That is effectively what Baratz told Hewlett Packard when he said that by reading the spec, they were bound to conform to Sun's rules even in their clean room development, no? Finally, IE on Unix does not have the level of OS integration that IE on Windows does. I think that's one of Microsoft's points. Thanks, Mike