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

To: ToySoldier who wrote (9863)	7/31/1998 5:17:00 PM
From: Gerald Walls	Respond to of 74651

3rd party vendors dont refuse to sell products on competing OSes, a main law of a capitalist economy is "Supply and Demand". Because MSFT has an overwhelming monopoly on the desktop, why would any 3rd party OEM/ISV in their right mind develop applications on a competing product with 2% marketshare? Absolutely correct. However you used the argument that since there are fews apps available for any of the competing OSes that you can chose to buy that you have no choice and therefore MSFT has a monopoly. Reversing your argument would mean that if apps were available then MSFT would not have a monopoly. If MSFT didn't have a monopoly they couldn't abuse one. You are therefore saying that MSFT should be punished because third party vendors don't sell apps for competing products. A company with a clear monopoly cannot use the monopoly as leverage to gain marketshare in other products they wish to compete in. To be more clear for you: They cannot leverage their clear monopoly in the desktop OS that 90%+ Intel computers need to run BROWSER software to market/sell their own version of BROWSER. Microsoft has done nothing that keeps anyone from using Netscape on Windows 98. Microsoft's not forcing anyone to use IE for their Internet Browser, just as they're not forcing anyone to use Microsoft Backup, Scandisk, Defrag or any of the other utilities that are considered part of Windows but have competing third-party products available. All of these are now considered part of the operating system and are, in a sense, given away for free when you buy the OS. MSFT would not have had a problem if they did not integrate the Browser into their Win95/Win98 and charged a seperate fee for the I.E. Why should Microsoft be required to charge a fee while Netscape can give away the competing product for free?