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

To: ed who wrote (8973)	7/6/1998 3:09:00 PM
From: Bearded One	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

ed-- I'll restate my position, but not in detail. For that, you can do a search on my posts. 1) My comparison of Intel to Microsoft concerned investor approval, not their core business. If anything, most people believed Intel to have a stronger monopoly than Microsoft. As you put it yourself "more advance software needs more powerful PC's," so few people expected Intel to run into problems. 2) Whether or not you or I think the DOJ case has merit, the Feds and 20 States think it has merit. Ask the tobacco companies what it does to business when the states team up against you. 3) If NT5 is not a big deal, then why bother with it? You can't have it both ways. If NT5 success is great for Microsoft, then NT5 failure is terrible for them. What if you believed that Microsoft would never crack the large-scale transaction server market? Microsoft said it is "betting the farm" on NT5. That's a quote from the top. So if it loses, it loses the farm? 4) If Windows 98 is not a big deal then why bother? Same arguments as above. 5)In toto, you can't claim a company will take over the world and simultaneously discount the importance of its future products. Will NT4 growth be enough to generate the revenues people truly expect?

To: ed who wrote (8973)	7/7/1998 2:24:00 AM
From: Mick Mørmøny	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Extra! Extra! Washington And Wall Street Wise Up Don't look now, but the climate for doing business in America may be getting noticeably healthier. And if a series of apparently unrelated developments truly comes to pass, the prospects for extending this fabulous bull market may just have improved more than most people have guessed. Consider: News flash: SERVING THE CONSUMER IS NOT NECESSARILY A CRIME. The government's antitrust policy is a long-running bad joke, rooted in the discredited theories of a century ago and conspicuously ill-suited to the ultracompetitive world of the next century. It makes us an object of derision to overseas rivals, whose governments have not caught the spiteful academic disease of seeking to punish and retard a country's most successful enterprises. (We had the best telephone system in the world, so we waged war on AT&T. We had the finest computer company in the world, so we did battle with IBM. Now we're supposed to think it's awful that Intel has become the world leader in semiconductors and Microsoft has shown the way in software. Lock `em all up instantly!) In the Justice Department, of course, nothing succeeds like failure. And so it is both stunning and heartening that a federal appeals court so devastatingly rejected a central argument in the government's vendetta against Microsoft: that there was something reprehensible in the company's plan to insert its own browser (free) into Windows 98. As even the normally detached Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan had tried to communicate, the record of antitrust legislation in seeking to improve competition suggests that there "ought to be a higher degree of humility." The market is faster, and smarter, than the professors. I understand why Netscape and its allies are mad at Number One; that goes with the territory. If they have a legal case, let them pursue it. But don't do it with taxpayer money and the arrogant power of the federal government. As a nation, we should cherish and encourage success, not least in the industry whose awesome products have done more to turn around the economy and raise our living standards than all the politicians and economic theorists combined. One cannot escape the conclusion that Microsoft's real sin, in the eyes of its tax-paid critics, was creating such magnificent progress without government authorization or regulation. It's nice to see an influential court in agreement. Not only does this increase the possibility that the government will simply drop its latest ill conceived cases and get out of the way of these splendid engines of American prosperity, but it presents us with a hopeful new standard for the future: beating your competitors by better serving the customer is not un-American as we had been told. By: Louis Rukeyser Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street, July 1998