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

To: t2 who wrote (17979)	3/14/1999 2:36:00 PM
From: RTev	Respond to of 74651

Well the seattletimes story I posted a little earlier states that it is Windows ( Win 98 is obviously "consumer" oriented.) The Times story says nothing about what codebase will be used. The one you posted earlier was a rewrite of a WSJ story. The most information about the reorg still comes from the original SeaTimes story about the reorganization: archives.seattletimes.com along with yesterday's story that gives the names of the guys who will run the four divisions: archives.seattletimes.com Those stories and others say only that a consumer version of the OS will become the responsibility of the new consumer group (DeVaan and Chase). None of them say what codebase will be used for that version. You might be right that Microsoft is ready to backtrack on their stated plans and continue with development of the Win95 codebase. (It wouldn't be the first time MS has made a significant shift in OS strategy.) But I doubt the decision has been firmly made yet since they've only just appointed the folks who will be responsible for implementing the development. Whatever the decision is, I doubt that it will be made as a legal ploy. Obviously, we've seen MS make technical decisions on legal grounds before -- like binding IE into the OS when it didn't make much marketing or technical sense to do so, but I don't think this reorg is quite the blatant legal ploy that you suggest. After all, if they were worried about DOJ forcing some kind of divestiture, it would be safer to leave Win98 where it is, in a division that is responsible only for the products at issue in the trial: Win98, IE, and tools like Media Player, plus Outlook which is not at issue but could be easily pulled back over to the applications division. To the extent that it is a legal ploy, it seems designed mostly to muddle the divisions among current groups so that a divestiture would become far more difficult. Now it may be true that we'll never see a unified OS codebase at MS, but the reasons for that would be technical: They just haven't been able to pull off the challenge of creating such a beast.