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

To: Bearded One who wrote (21222)	11/4/1998 11:01:00 PM
From: XiaoYao	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

If you think superior product along could give your company success, then think again. In this industry, nothing is without a given. When you make deals with other companies, you needs to have some bargain chips. If you want other companies carry your products, you need to offer something they are interested. When two products are fairly equivalent, (IE and NN) you need to have something else to convince other people. I don't know the financial situation of MSFT's Mac Office. I suspect MSFT spent more and make very little profit on it. So commitment of supporting this product is a bargain chip when talking to Apple. There is no obligation for MSFT to continue supporting Mac, so you could think of this as MSFT doing Apple a favor. There is nothing wrong at that. When negotiating with Apple, MSFT could say "OK, we spend a lot of effort to support Mac, now how about return us a favor to support IE?" This is negotiation, not a thread. Of course, when the time is right, you could interpret this as a thread when it can get you some advantage.

To: Bearded One who wrote (21222)	11/5/1998 11:07:00 AM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 24154

This is a very cogent post and presents the issue pretty clearly. I am in complete agreement on the quicktime example - if behavior such as this occurred, it is clear evidence of leverage of monopoly power to damage a competitor and ought to be restrained. but the other case is less clear. B) offering IE 4.0 to Apple coupled with a threat of stopping development of Mac Office if Apple didn't not only accept IE 4.0 but also stop promoting Netscape Navigator? The differences between this case and the quicktime discussion are substantial. MSFT produces office for the mac as a separate product, and elimination of that product is not selective abuse of a monopoly position, however damaging it may be to MAC business. The MAC is a small volume platform and the porting effort to support it is substantial. I have no doubt that this is a much less profitable product than office for PCs. At some point, if the ROI for maintaining the product drops substantially, it is a sensible business decision and in the interest of shareholders to discontinue the product. This is absolutely no different than the MSFT decision to drop PowerPC support in NT. In the case of PowerPC, MSFT gave IBM and Motorola several options - pay for some of the development (reducing the 'I' on ROI), provide additional marketing support (placing a bet on the 'R' in ROI)... but the PowerPC team did not want to provide the additional support. In the Apple case, it seems reasonable to expect preferential treatment of a related ported MAC product - after all, this is not the same as tying application SW to a necessary OS purchase (essential facility again). MS has a reasonable business justification for pressing apple to maximize the return on these MAC ports - after all, MAC is the only customer for this software.

To: Bearded One who wrote (21222)	11/10/1998 4:23:00 PM
From: XiaoYao	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

B) offering a competing product to Quicktime while simultaneously making changes in the Windows Registry so that Quicktime would not work correctly? You always listen to one side of story and think that is the fact. "Response to Allegations About Apple's QuickTime Plug-In for Internet Explorer" msdn.microsoft.com Mindcraft examined several cases where QuickTime multimedia plug-ins did not run as expected in Internet Explorer 4.0. The company discovered three root causes for the problems, including errors in Apple's code: 1. Version 2.0.1 of Apple's QuickTime Plug-In fails to provide the resources, outlined in Netscape's instructions, that tell Internet Explorer that it can handle files with "aifc," "qt," or "vfw" filename extensions. 2. Internet Explorer automatically gives precedence to ActiveX controls (such as ActiveMovie and WindowsMedia player) over plug-ins (such as the QuickTime Plug-In). This can be overridden by use of the EnablePlugIn registry key, but Apple did not use this override key. 3. Internet Explorer always uses registered helper applications for audio files referenced using the HREF HTML tag. A plug-in will not be used for playback of an audio file via HREF. This is a feature of Internet Explorer. If you understand anything about software install and registry stuff, you should understand what this is talking about. That is the allegation of "disable" competitors' products, did you see the episode of RealPlayer's allegation when its CEO testified?