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

To: Lin who wrote (19136)	3/29/1999 4:16:00 AM
From: RTev	Respond to of 74651

This does not sound too bad a deal to me. Microsoft get billions from the auction and get these DOJ & AGs off the back. I agree. It's a great starting point for negotiations. The main demands of the AGs seem to be: -- Microsoft must make a significant structural change that breaks the monopoly in some way. (They offer the auction as their preferred remedy but suggest several others.) -- Shareholders should be compensated for any structural change that occurs. They are not trying to destroy Microsoft. That has never been the intent of the antitrust laws and does not seem to be the intent even of the AG's auction proposal. Clearly, there are some on this board who do not trust Microsoft, who do not think it has the talent or energy to succeed in an open market. I don't agree. I think it does have both the talent and energy to succeed without the anchor of that monopoly. The monopoly requires them to stifle some of their good ideas, and forces them to make some weird decisions that make sense only from the lawyerly perspective in which they were made. (Example: delaying the release of an OS for six months or more so that they could weld the browser into Memphis in a way that was not all good for either the browser or the OS. That was an absolutely necessary from a legal standpoint, but not from any other.) Get rid of the monopoly and they can get rid of lawyer vetting of marketing and technical decisions. Get rid of the monopoly and they could concentrate on the future.

To: Lin who wrote (19136)	3/29/1999 9:23:00 AM
From: William Chaney	Respond to of 74651

Lin- You're exactly correct. Whatever the solution is, the state AG's should realize that MS did exactly this (make older versions obsolete) in the past with the "Win32 extensions", which just happened to make the OS/2 windows not work with programs, even though the changes added no functionality to the programs. That's why SUN gave up on WABI--because they realized that they were trying to hit a perpetually moving target. The only licensing solution that would work would be one that included all operating systems that MS developed, including WIN 2000, any OS's developed in the future, and new "versions" of these systems. I doubt if MS would go for that.