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

To: t2 who wrote (16607)	2/21/1999 6:08:00 PM
From: RTev	Respond to of 74651

Good point about the states' role in this. I agree that they are probably the toughest negotiators in settlement discussions. (And, by the way, settlement discussions are always a part of any trial game plan. Few civil suits ever make it this far. Most are settled before trial. Many that go to trial are settled before a judgement is rendered.) The states are the problem. They will try mightily to get the monopoly issue firmly and broadly stated in any settlement, while Microsoft would be unwilling to agree to anything that would give Sun and others too-fertile grounds to file the inevitable follow-on suits. But here's a hair-splitting advantage MS has in all of this: Even if they are forced to admit there is a monopoly in the Win95/98 market, Microsoft could claim that it no longer does business in that market since its new consumer OS must compete against that monopoly market and struggle against those barriers to entry established by the government's case. That wouldn't prevent suits based on past practices, but would protect them from suits and injunctions limiting future practices in the new OS market. (This is pretty much what they did in the DOS monopoly settlement on which Caldera bases their DR-DOS suit.)