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

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (21695)	4/27/1999 4:50:00 PM
From: ericneu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

"Anyway I changed my views after the netscape shenanigans msft pulled with the boxmakers. There simply was no excuse for "forcing" cpq and Dell to pull nscp from the desktop under the guise of supportability of windows." --- I know I've harped on this before, but that is NOT what happened. MSFT said that they could not remove IE from Windows, that Windows had to be delivered in its entirety. MSFT did NOT say that Navigator could not be included as well. Many OEMs ship systems with Navigator pre-loaded. As a matter of fact, at one point in the trial, some MSFT employees went down to CompUSA and purchased several off-the-shelf PCs to prove this very point. - Eric

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (21695)	4/27/1999 4:57:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

I think msft made a bad call there and jeapordized their future when what they should have done was do what they have done all along - compete successfully against nscp. There are aspects of this case that play out in classic tragic fashion. The basic plotline of tragedy has the hero, suffused with pride, making a decision that causes a series of unavoidable calamities that eventually undo his or her world. Microsoft's upper management made a series of simple mistakes culminating in that grand mis-judgement of bundling the browser. It's clear by now that they didn't need to do that. IE4, which was released a short time later, gave Microsoft a browser that compared well on its merits, and would likely have won the "browser war" without the bundling if Microsoft had played it right. But they didn't trust themselves. They felt that they needed to use their power -- the "Windows franchise", as they say -- to force whatever they came up with onto the market. The decision to bundle the browser and force box makers to take it seems baffling by now. How could they have thought they'd be able to get away with it? How could they have risked the cost (in cash, time, and energy) of what they should have known would become a drawn-out antitrust suit? Hubris. When they faced off with Microsoft in an antitrust case in 1995, the "Clintonista" (as one of our resident Rand cultists calls them) had ducked and run in one of the great legal surrenders of all time. Since legal documents are protected from discovery in trials, we'll never see Boise waving one of the legal memoranda distributed at Microsoft at the time, but one must imagine that MS management was supremely confident after that victory. The bundling decision -- especially because it was so unnecessary -- seems like a kind of strutting challenge. They did it not because they needed to do it, but because they could do it and doing it would demonstrate their power for all to see.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (21695)	4/27/1999 6:11:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Respond to of 74651

Michelle, you make an excellent point. What got the DoJ interested was not a Democratic president, it was CPQ, AOL, NSCP, and NOVL responding to MSFT's heavy handed demands re IE. If this situation had arisen in a Republican administration, we would be having an entirely different argument, but the facts, issues, and results would be the same. We would be debating whether Bill is a flaming liberal who riled the republican senators who represent the states in which CPQ, NOVL, NSCP and AOL reside and pressured the DoJ to prosecute, which, imo, is exactly what happened.