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To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (22664)	2/14/1999 12:49:00 AM
From: Gerald R. Lampton	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

My Microsoft split proposal ??? I think Charles Hughes on this thread would dispute that, as would Scott McNealy in the larger public forum. At any rate, authorship does not matter as much as substance, and the substance here is that it looks more and more like Boies is actually going to break them up. I've got to hand it to Boies. He's got cojones. I'm going to be really disappointed if he doesn't go for it, after all the media buildup and anticipation. Here is more on the defense fiasco, which I think may have been decisive in upping the government's resolve on the issue of remedies. And we're seeing one other thing. We're seeing Microsoft's defense go down in flames. For the three months the government was putting on its case, Microsoft cautioned the press to wait for the company's defense. Now, that defense is under way, and the company's first two executives have staggered away from the witness stand with serious questions raised about their credibility. If Microsoft loses this trial--and make no mistake, that's where we're headed if things don't change quickly--the events of the past two weeks will be a lot of the reason why. For Microsoft, this trial is no longer Alice in Wonderland. It's Dante's Inferno. pathfinder.com First it was the former president of the ABA section on Antitrust saying Microsoft was "doomed," now the folks at that commie, pinko magazine, Fortune, chime in with, "It's Dante's Inferno." I would not count them out, but, like I said, the fact that Microsoft has shown itself in court to be untrustworthy changes the whole ball game. What judge is going to want to spend the next twenty years hearing motions to compel Microsoft to comply with the injunction? What judge is going to want to spend his career parsing Windows source code to see if Microsoft OS Company is hiding code in there somewhere that really should be sold by Microsoft Applications, Inc.? And what judge wants to have to figure out who is telling the truth about whether Microsoft is still enforcing those pesky contractual restrictions, or hiding APIs, or secretly tying Windows to IE, or whether Windows crashes because it was rigged to crash when you remove that new DLL, or whether it just crashes because it sucks? Just mentioning these various scenarios should be enough to make it clear that the McNealy/Bork breakup proposal is about the only remedy that makes any sense.

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (22664)	2/15/1999 6:40:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

<< Robert Bork, once upon a time too conservative to get onto the Supreme Court, now has a modest proposal for helping the world cope with Microsoft: split the company into triplets -- three equal, cloned Microsofts. >> It's still a proposal that ignores all of the realities of software development teams and marketing strategies, not to mention packaging, etc etc. I think this is why Microsoft has recently reorganized with new divisions similar to those I proposed for the breakup. With the new divisions in place and debugged as independent units by the time the trial winds around to the solutions phase, including team and personnel moves, it will be only natural for the court to break the company apart along the unit divisions already arrived at by the company last month. That will do the least damage and preserve shareholder value the best. I think MSFT sees this. It will also be better for the country to have several new large viable software companies that are differentiated and ready to do business with anyone, including having the teams and resources ready to do Sun and Linux versions of their applications. Cheers, Chaz BTW, the reason Bork didn't make it to the supreme court is that he sold out on the firing of Archibald Cox for Richard Nixon, doing something his superiors had resigned rather than do.