Salon.com > Salon Technology staff report

Does Microsoft need a makeover?

Thu, 25 May 2000 18:16:00 +0000

It's not too late to dream up a new name for Fusion 2000, the "world's largest gathering of Microsoft business partners," scheduled to take place in Atlanta this summer. Maybe Fission 2000?

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who is presiding over the antitrust suit, hinted he had been pondering a split-up of the software giant -- just not the one that the Department of Justice had suggested in its proposed remedies. "A bisection will in effect create two separate monopolies," Jackson said, while asking the department's lawyers why they hadn't proposed a three-way split, dividing the company into operating system (Windows), applications (Office) and browser (Internet Explorer) divisions.

Jackson then asked the government to refine its proposal for breaking up the company and submit a fresh draft on Friday.

Reactions to stock carnage: “The bubble has burst”

Fri, 14 Apr 2000 12:00:00 +0000

Both the Dow and the NASDAQ logged their biggest single-day losses ever on Friday. The Dow Jones industrial average declined 617.78 to 10305.77, a loss of 5.66 percent, while the NASDAQ composite index went down 355.49 points, a loss of 9.67 percent. Here are some reactions to the bloodbath:

Anthony Perkins

Chairman of Red Herring Communications and co-author of "The Internet Bubble: Inside the Overvalued World of High-Tech Stocks -- And What You Need to Know to Avoid the Coming Shakeout" (Harper Business, November 1999)

Clearly, the bubble has burst. I think things will never be the same. I think a lot of the Internet companies that shouldn't have gone public have been found out and you won't see them go back up. What's happened is a lot of people have lost a lot of money. I think it's going to scar people for a long time, and they're going to realize that it's now back to fundamentals. It's back to rationality.

I'm probably the only happy man in the universe, and fortunately I took my own advice. I'm not in the market. Of course, I'm not in the market anyway, as an editor. But needless to say, I'm not surprised.

Break up? Make up? Appeal?

Mon, 03 Apr 2000 15:30:00 +0000

Here are reactions to Monday's Microsoft antitrust ruling from participants and expert observers.

Stephen Manes

Biographer of Bill Gates, Forbes columnist and co-host of public television's "Digital Duo"

Microsoft has always lived fairly close to the edges of the law, and has come out on the right side of some of the decisions, and on the wrong one in some -- including where they lost the patent infringement case against Stac, and they solved the problem by buying a piece of the company. Likewise, they just settled out of court with Caldera, for an unnamed figure of money assumed to be in the nine figures.

They've been forced to sign consent decrees -- where you swear you do nothing wrong and you promise to never do it again. Microsoft's very first product was subject to binding arbitration. In 1977, there was a legal dispute over the very first contract the company had signed. Microsoft is not a stranger to a courtroom and the legal process.