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

To: rudedog who wrote (10760)	9/12/1998 10:18:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Thank you, I think, rudedog, but, you know, I'm a bit confused here. When I refer to Compaq "contractually banning Netscape from the premises", it goes back to this Spencer the Katt column from late July: If Digital employees want to tune into the Web deflowering from their workplace, they'll probably have to do so using Internet Explorer instead of Netscape Navigator, a friend of the Feline reports. Employees at Digital, an all-Netscape shop before being bought by Compaq, got a notice two weeks ago telling them that in order to view Compaq's internal sites, they had to convert to IE 4.0 by the end of the week. Why the change? Compaq, the tipster reports, has a contract with Microsoft requiring that all Compaq desktop users run IE. So Compaq put a "hook" in its internal site, which it scheduled to kick off on the deadline it set for users to convert to IE, to refuse access to Netscape browsers. That edict created quite a stir, since it meant converting 50,000 desktops to IE 4.0 in just four days. The requirement also left Digital's Unix users out in the cold. I posted this in the other former in www2.techstocks.com, July 21, but the URL just goes to the current column. It's just a rumor column, but there's a certain consistency in all this stuff. Want to comment on that particular rumor? It may be distorted, and I'm sure it'd be denied that such a contract existed. On the other hand, it sort of sounds like what Dell's salespeople told the Senators and everybody else about Nav availability, versus what Michael Dell told the Senate. As to the letter threatening to pull the Windows 95 license, that was a long time ago, I'd have to go check the stories again. Maybe the press got it wrong, but there was a certain consistency there, too, as Nav disappeared from all the OEMs almost simultaneously. And simultaneously, they were all professing their love and admiration of Microsoft. Coincidence? Could be, but I'm still with Andy Grove on this one. Push comes to shove, where were they going to go? Which company was expendable? Then, there was that quote from some 'softie, "They have to ship the machines the way we build them". Didn't sound like one little Compaq product line there, but I forget the context. I understand that you have firsthand dealings with OEM contract negotiations. Does anybody major, besides IBM, have the leverage to go against Microsoft on these things? Ted Waite's been pushing the envelope lately, but that seems to be just testing the water under antitrust coverage. Would you like to share any general insight from your experience? I've always thought this was a key strength of Microsoft, but, you know, it seems a little inconsistent with the, uh, "we listen to our customers" rhetoric. Cheers, Dan.