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To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (19959)	6/9/1998 2:18:00 AM
From: Gerald R. Lampton	Respond to of 24154

I'm really surprised no one has picked up on this little hum-dinger: spyglass1.sjmercury.com The Seattle start-up, Pixel Co., has a software innovation that is essentially an attempt to grab a slender band of the computer screen, just beyond the desktop and outside Microsoft's contract rules. It does this by occupying some unused screen space, called the overscan area, about 1/4-inch to 1/2-inch along each edge of the screen. Pixel's product is a control bar called My Space that sits on the bottom edge of the screen, just below the Windows 95 task bar. By clicking on a My Space icon, a user can link to a site on the Internet's World Wide Web, control hardware like a CD player, or start software programs. This has some serious potential. I mean, they could set up a little pop-up menu or icon, which the user could then click on to do any number of things: surf the web, start a program, or, horrors, obliterate the entire Microsoft Desktop and replace it with something else. The article goes on to talk about how the same lawyer at Irell & Manella who represented Stac, both on their data compression patent and in the subsequent lawsuit, also filed a patent for this product. So, it will be very interesting to see how Microsoft responds. ''The real question here is whether Microsoft is going to challenge this and claim that even the overscan area belongs to Microsoft,'' said Steinberg. ''If it does, that would represent an aggressive expansion of its desktop, pushing others aside at a time when it faces a major antitrust case.'' What are they going to do????