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

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (10735)	9/12/1998 9:40:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Dan - an excellent post, with many good insights, but I want to give you some background on one commonly believed myth. On the other hand, when push came to shove in the sacred icon war, poor Eckhard had no choice but unconditional surrender. And the poor DEC Unix engineers are scratching their heads about what to do for a browser, since Compaq made the "choice" to contractually ban Netscape from the premises Compaq was among the first to ship Netscape Navigator on its systems, especially consumer products. There have always been products which ship Navigator as standard. There was never a ban on Netscape at Compaq. The much quoted discussion between Compaq and MSFT over Netscape was over a particular Compaq consumer product which violated basic license terms. This dispute was created and driven by Celeste Dunn, who had been head of a small (13 people I think) software company in San Mateo that Compaq bought in 1995 to create children's software for a new line of 'kiddie computers'. She became a Compaq VP after her company was acquired. Celeste was a charter member of the 'bill is bad' club and used her position to create confrontations between redmond and Compaq procurement. She felt that Compaq was big enough to bully MSFT into very favorable bundling terms including use of MSFT IP in the products she was building. The famous MSFT letter referred to this specific product line. The impression given in the press was that this applied broadly to all of Compaq's products, but that was disputed by John Rose who pointed to the large number of products which either shipped both IE and navigator, or which shipped Navigator without IE. The letter so often quoted in the press involved less than .5% of Compaq product. Compaq has huge leverage with Microsoft, not only as their largest customer but also as a deep technology partner, and Pfeiffer is not a guy who is inclined to be pushed around in any event. I can give numerous examples where CPQ told both Intel and Microsoft to pound salt when pressure was applied, and made it stick.