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

To: DavidD who wrote (12115)	11/9/1998 9:26:00 AM
From: DownSouth	Respond to of 74651

>They might try and convert open standard protocols (for networking and internet communications), to proprietary standards by making them more complex. I agree that MSFT's tactics are self serving and do see the DoJ's argument to a degree. But, FWIW, the practice of extending standards to differentiate a proprietary product is certainly not unique to MSFT. It is an age-old practice and any company that wishes to carve out a niche, large or small, would be foolish not to do the same. Remember COBOL? It was a standard (CODASYL) and every vendor who ever wrote a COBOL compiler put their own extensions into their language. As far as making them more complex, just as with COBOL, these extensions usually make the product easier to use by innovating in order to solve a problem or deliver a capability that the standard missed or was too controversial to bet the standards committtee to agree on.