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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jonathan Bird who wrote (23156)	2/15/1999 4:22:00 PM
From: soup	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

>If I had not received an education in economics in business school,then I might feel more comfortable playing fast and loose with a pop cultural understanding of monopoly. But since I did, I don't.< Jon, To my (pop-culture) understanding, it is not illegal to be a monopoly -- so long as you don't engage in anti-competitive practices. Nor is it illegal to engage in anti-competitive practices -- so long as you're not a monopoly. DOJ testimony to date, appears to show MSFT guilty of both. What am I missing? And to get back to the original point of my query, (assuming the DOJ proves the above to the judge's satisfaction) what are the likely remedies and how might each affect Apple and its stock price? My favorite so far is treble damages ... :)

To: Jonathan Bird who wrote (23156)	2/15/1999 6:19:00 PM
From: MeDroogies	Respond to of 213173

I don't need to write it up. It's being written as we speak. I respectfully submit the DOJ case which (up to now) has made MSFT look quite foolish...and all on their own. The DOJ had little to do with it. Besides, the case for monopoly revision is already pretty well enshrined (though it will be more fully developed after this case) in that MSFT won't ever execute true monopoly pricing due to the fact that they are constantly competing not only with competitors, but themselves. Why? Because if they price WinXX at its real monopoly value of, say, $2000...nobody would buy it and keep using Win95. No real skin off MSFT's teeth in terms of control of the desktop, but it impacts their bottom line. As a result, they will ALWAYS try to price themselves at what could be described as a "market" price (or slightly higher) in order to get people to buy into the upgrades they offer. Hence, the monopoly concept, as we recognize from industrial America, is already under revision.