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To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (21788)	11/26/1998 4:59:00 AM
From: Bearded One	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

let's see if you can come up with something that I can't argue is consistent with contestable markets. Gerald, I sense a lawyer's trap coming on. After all, you can argue anything, right? But I'll take the bait, with the reservation that I get to try again. Ok, Kempin's email to Bill Gates, where he outlines potential competition to Microsoft and then disses it. It will take me a while to find the precise document, but here's an excerpt from in that's in Warren-Boulton's testimony: Our high prices could get a single OEM (Compaq might pay us 750M$ next year) or a coalition to fund a competing effort (say in India). While this possibility exists I consider it doubtful even if they could get a product out that they can market it successfully, leapfrog us and would not deviate from their own standard to differentiate. Could they convince customer [sic] to change their computing platform is the real questions [sic]. The existing investments in training, infrastructure and applications in windows computing are huge and will create a lot of inertia. No bundling of OS on low end systems would be the easiest way to hurt us – but who would want to start with this and loose [sic] business The evidence is important because I think we can agree that Kempin is in a position to have an excellent perspective on the industry. Compaq is a large and powerful hi-tech company with tremendous expertise in the computer market and tremendous distribution channels, a tremendous reason to enter the OS market (the 750$ million they pay to Microsoft each year). Not to mention the ability to specialize their own OS to different niche markets, etc.. Yet Kempin dismisses this possibility, essentially claiming that the barriers to entry are too high. For the purposes of this discussion, let's limit our discussions of Operating Systems both real and theoretical to those which run Win32 business applications, such as Microsoft Office. Thus, I won't claim that Microsoft has a monopoly on Operating Systems in general, but only on PC desktop operating systems for the business market.