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

To: Teflon who wrote (19426)	3/31/1999 6:04:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

And I see the similarities as something that will keep them apart. It's a question of control, I suppose. It looks to me like both companies like to control things and seek to avoid situations where someone else can get a choke-hold that gives one company excessive control. Microsoft has heavy investments in several competitors to AT&T, including Comcast, Roadrunner, Qwest, Rhythms. Smaller companies like those can benefit from Microsoft's technical expertise, and are willing to give up some control over their own destinies to get it. AT&T, for its part, is unlikely to give up much control -- especially not to a company like Microsoft that has a history of being unkind to its partners. AT&T now has agreements with IBM after the two traded parts of their businesses. That partnership could be considered MS-hostile. And AT&T still has active technical development teams at AT&T Labs who seem to approach the same issues in much different ways than Microsoft does. Oh, and AT&T is still a heavily Unix-flavored company. Some parts of the history remain even after all their divestitures.