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

To: Charles Hughes who wrote (21732)	11/24/1998 12:46:00 PM
From: Reginald Middleton	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 24154

I have sat back and observed your comments for several posts, but it is getting difficult not to respond. MSFT appears to be a natural monopoly that benefits the people, and it is not comparable to Linux or Unix or Apple. Notice the proliferation of apps, hardware selection and avialability of programmers on the Win32 platform. This is not available on any other computer platform known to man. This is GOOD for the people Chaz not bad. Sun and SGI may not be guilty of the practices that you love to hate, but if the Win 32 platform was as fractured as UNIX or as proprietary as Apple, the people would be much WORSE off. <This gets my vote for most witless headline of the month. How being so weakened one must be taken over at a stock price far below the peak once reached is good fails me.> It probably fails you Chaz because you are not taking into consideration the fact that NSCP was so ridiculously priced that only naive retail investors or institutions who are promised an exit vehicle above what they paid for it would buy the stock at those prices. No sane or prudent business leader would bother to touch NSCP shares at anything near its high prices. Just because some brokerage firm hypes shares prices through the roof does not mean that the company is actually worth that much, strategically or financially. <How having the notoriously proprietary-prone AOL take over Netscape is good for the rest of us is unclear too.> As the largest, most profitable, and probably one of the fastest growing online properties in history, AOL's management is singularly the most qualified to extract the maximum shareholder value out of NSCP's website. NSCP's web site has been steadily losing traffic although NSCP has been steadily pouring resources into it. If you want more than two or three main content competitors (MSFT and Yahoo - possibly Disney), then the good of this deal should become clear to you soon enough. <And any connection to whether MSFT did wrong in the past or needs to be controlled now is absurd.> The point is that MSFT did not perform and wrong deeds in the past. They have done exactly what AOL, Sun and NSCP are doing. AOL is attacking MSFT at its source of strategic power, the browsing client, highly trafficked, brand name sites, and enterprise software through strategic acquisition and co-venturing. This is what MSFT did to NSCP.