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To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (22688)	2/15/1999 7:55:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

<< After the breakup, what? Do you let each invade the others' space, or do you have some governmental or judicial bureaucracy keeping each in its place? >> Absolute independence. Government monitors in place to make sure there is no continuing collusion. No deals allowed for some years. Otherwise they can still effectively function as a monopoly on the technical level into the future, further corrupting our technological progress. Plus they could act in concert against competitors. Also, if everybody owns something, nobody owns it. The Achilles heel of communes everywhere. You need a great deal of idealism, as in either the 60's, or in the case of Linux, to make such a thing work, or a social structure that enforces sharing, as in science or government, and they have none of those things going for them. So I would predict shared or open code would fail. Cross-company efforts fail more often than succeed, and these folks should all be busy tending to their own, focused, knitting. It's what MSFT owns that matters at this point, not the alleged skills and vision of it's development teams and managers. Financially, I suspect that if they all own the same code, that code could not be taken into account in net asset value of the corps at nearly the same value as today, because they could not sell or license exclusive rights to anyone else, including in takeovers. It's true that they are barely getting win2000 done now, and you can't break up the OS teams. So don't. A problem that will be mirrored in other areas in the 'baby bills' proposal. << I mean, if it's good enough for Semantech or Motorola/IBM/Apple to do with chips, why not do the same with software development? >> Sematech was about the government and industry assembling a team to do leading edge R&D work to provide the grounds for applied development by the companies involved, in the national interest. MSFT is pretty far from doing leading edge work, or being a real R&D organization. Microsoft is the International Harvester of software. Cheers, Chaz

To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (22688)	2/16/1999 10:11:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

Calling In Experts to Fix Microsoft if It's Broken nytimes.com Then, there's the good gray Times on remedies. I remain agnostic on the subject. Quotes for amusement only, there are serious elements in this story but I will continue to eschew policy debates for the moment. Another breakup proposal is to carve Microsoft into two to five identical companies, each with the programming code for all Microsoft products. The resulting companies -- the "Baby Bills," after Microsoft's chairman, William H. Gates, and a pun on the Baby Bells formed in the split-up of AT&T -- would then compete with each other. This approach has been promoted by some of Microsoft's harshest critics -- for months by Gary L. Reback, a former legal adviser to the rival Netscape Communications Corporation, and more recently by Robert H. Bork, the former Federal judge, who is a consultant to Netscape. Well, I heard it here first, anyway, from the harsh Gerald Lampton. Harsh is a relative term, from my long diversion in the political flame wars here, nobody who's ever posted in this forum counts as harsh by those standards. Except for maybe that guy who followed me here around Thanksgiving, but that doesn't count, it was just political blowback. Microsoft dismisses the debate over remedies. "It's all academic because Microsoft will win the case when all is said and done," said Charles F. Rule, a former senior Justice Department official who is a consultant to the software giant. "And this talk of structural remedies is the antitrust equivalent of nuclear winter -- just bizarre." It's beyond bizarre! It's totally random! Rick RUUUUULLLLLEEEEZZZZ! He also seems to have been spending time with his boss lately. Who knows, the next election is 21 months, if the Republicans can get their act together and Bill backs the right horse, Rick might get his old job back and flush the suit down the toilet. I'm not sure if he could deal with the states by fiat, but I'm sure he'd be willing to try. Cheers, Dan.