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

To: Bearded One who wrote (21780)	11/25/1998 9:45:00 PM
From: Alan Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

[So, we have lots of non-conclusive evidence. But all the non-conclusive evidence points in the same direction.] Hardly. You're not considering "all" the evidence at all. MSFT bashers claim the reason MSFT succeeds in office apps is that their apps groups benefits from special knowledge of the alleged monopoly OS. Yet, MSFT has an even larger share of the office apps on the Macintosh, where it has no special knowledge of the OS and in fact has a checkered relationship with the OS maker. (MSFT makes more money per unit on Mac software than PC software. Mac customers are used to being gouged, PC customers aren't.) Further, the MSDN CDs MSFT offers to developers for little more than cost, is HUGE. What do developers need to know about Windows that's not there in some form? Win98, MSFTs mainline OS currently sells for $99. The DOS5/Win3 combination, the mainline system 8 years ago, sold for basically the same price. Meanwhile MSFTs R&D investment to produce Win98 dwarfs that of DOS5/Win3. The profits are coming from higher volumes, not price gouging. The Linux OS has recently gained considerable attention and respect as a viable system for production environments. It's essentially free, which is obviously a strong deterrent as far as MSFT introducing price gouging in the future. Further, Linux illustrates that MSFT controls no key resource barring entry into the PC OS market. They simply control a product currently in good favor, through much hard work on their part. NSCP, a 2 year old company, is valued by AOL at about $4B. Very few 2 year old companies have a valuation of anything near that, and certainly no from-scratch company achieves $4B market value in an industry truly controlled by a problem monopoly. (It's comical that mega-millionaires like Barksdale and McNealy cry that MSFT is wiping them out. Both of these guys are accumulating wealth at a tremendous pace.) NSCP has been presented as the little guy trying to win with the better product, yet during a recent 1 year period IE4 won more than 90% of the press reviews against NSCPs browser. Very lop-sided results that obviously have much to do with MSFTs gains in that market. MSFT bashers claim that MSFT has the OEMs "under their thumb", afraid to sell non-MSFT products. Meanwhile, DELL is making billions as a strong MSFT partner, recently performing better than MSFT itself. It simply makes business sense for Dell. The OEMs are in the business they have chosen. If there was money in selling OS/2, he'd do it, but there's not, and it's a lot of trouble to add more variables to your product line. MSFT sells no higher percentage of PC OSes than SUNW sells of Sparc OSes or AAPL sells of Mac OSes. They, in fact, have less control over hardware than either of these equally monopolistic competitors, and benefit from price competition in hardware that their monolithic competitors have purposely avoided. The government has mainly produced "evidence" that MSFT is a hard-ball negotiator and very successful. What an incredible waste of resources.

To: Bearded One who wrote (21780)	11/25/1998 11:39:00 PM
From: Gerald R. Lampton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

There seems to be lots of evidence that points to the possibility that Microsoft is a monopoly in the OS market. You're right that there is a lot of evidence. But evidence is susceptible to differing interpretations; making the right interpretation based on the evidence and reasonable inferences is the essence of fact-finding. I will wager that, other than expert opinion testimony, there isn't a piece of evidence you can point to in the case so far that is not consistent with both the view that Microsoft is a monopoly and the view that its markets are contestable, at least to some degree. That said, I will also wager that the judge will pick your interpretation of the evidence, but just for sport's sake, let's see if you can come up with something that I can't argue is consistent with contestable markets. Pick the worst "smoking gun" memos, the worst testimony you can come up with, and put your interpretation on it. Then let's see if I can spin it the other way. Make sure it's accessible at the DOJ site or elsewhere on line so I can see it, too. :)

To: Bearded One who wrote (21780)	11/26/1998 3:14:00 AM
From: Keith Hankin	Respond to of 24154

So, we have lots of non-conclusive evidence. But all the non-conclusive evidence points in the same direction. To me, that's pretty conclusive. This leaves just two arguments against concluding that Microsoft is a monopoly. One, it could just be luck on Microsoft's part. Lots of disparate random factors colliding together gives the false impression that Microsoft is a monopoly. If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and looks like a duck...