Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Teflon who wrote (18702)	3/24/1999 11:48:00 AM
From: RTev	Respond to of 74651

re ATHM, T, MSFT: It's interesting to guess but difficult to know where Microsoft's paranoia is focused at the moment. I suspect that @home is at least in the periphery of the company's worried eyes. Secondly, ATHM/AT&T will never be a pure competitor of MSFT. MSFT will stay in the software/applications end of the business. Of course. The companies are in essentially different businesses. But what's bothersome to Microsoft is the point where convergence among those businesses take place. ATHM and T are network/utilities and MSFT is a software developer, yet both ATHM and MSFT have become involved in content creation, aggregation, and delivery on the internet and both T and MSFT seek to shift that content to cable settops. Why? Because that's a point of convergence. Microsoft wants to supply the software to those settop boxes in the same way it supplies the software for Dell's boxes. If Microsoft sites (many of which run proprietary solutions to web viewing/listening) become a primary destination, then MS has a better chance of controlling the whole platform. It wants to control the portals through which the user goes from one activity to another on that settop in the same way it tries to control the desktop on Dell's boxes. It clearly does not want its internet sites to become just one more destination on the settop box or on the internet itself. Through @home and its cable wires, AT&T could become a competitor by adopting standards for its settops that are not controlled or at least heavily influenced by Microsoft. The settop could then become a wedge to crack Microsoft's computer dominance and could also become a non-Redmonian way of interfacing with information appliances of the future. If people start using a web-reader hooked wirelessly to their settop boxes (or to AT&T's wireless network), Microsoft wants to supply the software they use to read the pages. It does not want AT&T or @home to adopt someone else's sunny alternativs. Microsoft wants to see its software in phones and PDAs and TeleTubby dolls because they look like the platforms of the future. Both ATHM and AT&T are a wild cards in that future. Neither one is a natural ally of Microsoft partly because the Unix-flavored tech history of both puts them on the other divide in the back office. The cable industry as a whole seems disinclined to jump too quickly into Microsoft's camp. Microsoft may win them over eventually (and its investments help a lot in that), but victory is far from assured.