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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: t2 who wrote (16168)	2/16/1999 10:58:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

They are better off fighting it in the courts to the end. Clearly, that's what Scott McNealy of Sun is hoping they'll do. Consider IBM. They "won" by dragging out their ultimate anti-trust trial for years. The DOJ eventually dropped the case when IBM had started to wither. But was it worth it? I've seen a few analyses that suggest IBM lost their edge partly because they had to worry about how each step might affect the antitrust case. Bill, Steve, and the boys (and, umm, one woman on the board) know that and have been trying to keep the case off in the peripheral vision at Microsoft, but I don't think it's working. I'm convinced that the delay in what became Windows98 was due largely to legal considerations concerning what would become this case. It took at least a year to recover from the mess of trying to combine two separate groups, the browser/internet folks and the OS folks. Those management decisions that don't make much apparent sense to the folks who have to do the work are the kinds of things that drain energy. Plus, there's that constant drain of millions to fight the case. A few million here and there is insignificant to Microsoft, but it might be enough to fund the next great notion that won't get pursued.