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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (20945)	9/14/1998 3:28:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Strategies Set in Microsoft Antitrust Case nytimes.com Fun article! Battle lines are drawn, we'll see how they hold up. For Microsoft -- accused of bullying competitors, bribing allies and forcing customers to use the company's products, like them or not -- one general defense has come down to this: So what? Everyone does it. That is how business operates. As John Warden, a Microsoft lawyer, put it: "All companies compete; that's how the market works." But lawyers for the Justice Department and 20 state attorneys general who filed the landmark lawsuit against the software giant four months ago predict that Microsoft's own leaders will prove the government's case. In hundreds of e-mail messages and memorandums written over the last several years, most of which will be entered as evidence, these executives unabashedly laid out their plans and intentions. What the documents show, said David Boies, a Justice Department lawyer, is that Microsoft "bribed people to take their products, used predatory pricing and other anti-competitive tactics." If every company behaves this way, as Microsoft asserts, "then we're going to be very busy" in the coming years, one antitrust official remarked. We'll see what the Microsoft fishing expedition comes up with. As sometimes secret head of the nefarious international ilk conspiracy, I'm nervously waiting for my subpoena. Meanwhile, on the soft drink front of the metaphorical analogical war, we have this entertaining exchange: As the two sides offered their competing strategies on Friday, Jackson seemed equally willing to challenge both. For example, one part of the government's suit accuses Microsoft of requiring Internet service providers to support Internet Explorer, Microsoft's browser for navigating the World Wide Web, in exchange for receiving promotional space on a part of the main Windows screen known as the channel bar. "If your browser is so good, why do you need all those covenants anyway?" Jackson asked. Warden, the Microsoft lawyer, responded that the arrangements were simply "promotional marketing agreements, very common tools of competition, just like Pepsi makes a deal with Pizza Hut to feature Pepsi exclusively." The judge responded that such marketing arrangements did not exist in the computer industry until Microsoft introduced them. (me: oops, what happened to the "Everybody does it" defense? I guess this one was a Microsoft "innovation", and Microsoft must be free to innovate,you know) "But Coca-Cola certainly does it," Warden said. "Yes, but Coke is not a monopoly," the judge answered. As he had noted earlier, the rules governing how a monopolist can behave are very different from those governing other companies. But that's not fair! Cheers, Dan.