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

To: LindyBill who wrote (16382)	2/18/1999 5:45:00 PM
From: t2	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

Here is what shareholders can do--from the Microsoft Website microsoft.com Notice the "speak up" option and "tell us your opinion". I think all Americans should be sending the e-mails to their Congressional or state representives.---So do it!! Click on Speak Up.

To: LindyBill who wrote (16382)	2/18/1999 6:22:00 PM
From: Frank Ellis Morris	Respond to of 74651

LindyBill the article is indeed a masterpiece and I am going to publish an excerpt from it here again Many people ask: If Microsoft's products are so demonstrably good, why is the company under assault? The answer is: precisely because its products are good. Does Microsoft have a unique advantage by being able to package its browser with Windows? Of course. It has earned that advantage, because it, and no one else, developed Windows into a leading product. If its competitors want the same benefit, let them make a product equal to Windows. If buyers do not like the terms Microsoft is asking, they are completely free to patronize Microsoft's competitors. What they should not be free to do is to have Microsoft while eating it too. All the prattle about " anti-competitive practices" means only one thing: Microsoft is too competent. Antitrust law is a tool to enforce the claims of any second-rater against any innovator. If you invent something so good that the market clamors for it and makes you wealthy, you are deemed a "monopolist," because your competitors are "shut out" of this market — the market you have created. Microsoft is only the latest in a long line of victims of the unjust antitrust laws. From ALCOA in the 1950s to IBM in the 1970s, to Wal-Mart in the 1980s, the government's goal has always been the same: prosecute an exceptional firm that is growing rich, not through theft or fraud, but through superior production and voluntary trade. Microsoft should be cheered for taking an unusually firm stand against the Justice Department. But company officials are focusing on the wrong issue. Their basic argument should not be that the public benefits from the unfettered freedom of the best producers. This argument is true, but is not fundamental — and the antitrusters know it. Microsoft needs to make the moral case for economic freedom. It needs to uphold the moral right to reap the rewards of one's achievements — the moral right to soar as high as one's talents take one — the moral right to succeed and not be shackled to others' non-success. The principle to defend is that ability should be a source of reward, not a cause of punishment — a principle upon which America was built, and a principle of which antitrust law is an obscene mockery This is the position that will free Microsoft — and all other producers — from the envious clutches of the success-haters. Mr. Salsman is an economist in Boston and an essayist for the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, CA; aynrand.org Thanks for the article Best Wishes Frank