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

To: t2 who wrote (19519)	4/1/1999 9:45:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

It will be interesting to see how MS lawyers approach the depositions of Sun and AOL executives. It's a mystery to me why this is part of the case at all, except that Jackson made one of his bizarre off-the-record comments about it just after the buyout was announced. What seems to have surprised him (and any other rational being who looked at the deal) was the outrageously high price AOL was willing to pay for a company that seemed to be dead in the water. The Microsoft argument seems to be, "Look. We didn't harm Netscape if the company was still worth billions after all that we'd done." It's an interesting claim, but I'm not sure it has all that much to do with this case, and it seems easy enough for Boies to dismiss it if it's brought up as a defense. Really. Anybody who was worried enough about it to sell your MSFT stock when this deal went through, raise your hand. What the deal gives AOL is an attractive, well-programmed, and well-visited portal. It's a portal that isn't saddled with the less-than-sterling "AOL" name and which has been aimed from the start at businesses. That poses some trouble for msn.com, but very little to Windows and this case is all about consumer Windows. AOL's agreement with Sun might (although it's doubtful) put some additional pressure on NT and BackOffice, but again, it poses little threat to consumer Windows. AOL also got an open-source browser project. Maybe Mozilla still poses some kind of threat to consumer Windows, but it's hard to see it in its current form. Microsoft lawyers will have their work cut out for them to make this stuff anything but an interesting side-show that has no ultimate effect on the outcome of the trial.