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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jack Whitley who wrote (23943)	10/11/1998 11:52:00 AM
From: EPS	Respond to of 42771

Even Red Herring is turning against MSFT.. LEADER: WERE WE WRONG TO DEFEND MICROSOFT? Is Microsoft as bad as everyone (but the Red Herring) has said? The Red Herring magazine November 1998 We supported Microsoft when its enemies and the government called it a monopoly. We did so on principle. We were inclined to see its success as honestly achieved. We thought that even Microsoft could lose its business to an innovative competitor. We distrusted government intervention and thought regulation a clumsy tool. And we believed that a single, proprietary standard for operating systems had, on the whole, been good for innovation (see "Is Microsoft Bad?"). But we believed that although Microsoft might use Windows to guarantee a market for its other products (by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, for instance), it should not use its OS to sabotage competitors (say, by making Windows incompatible with DR DOS, an MS-DOS alternative). In our minds, there was a crucial difference between the two: a fair exploitation of Microsoft's assets vs. an abuse of an industry standard. Now, email exchanged between Microsoft's executives--subpoenaed by the Justice Department and first reported on the Herring Online--suggests that Microsoft has for years used Windows in ways that benefit neither consumers nor the industry. We do not want to see the Windows business regulated. But Microsoft must live up to the heavy responsibility of owning the most common PC platform. It is in its own interest to do so. But if Microsoft will not, then the government can, and should, make it.