Word: antitrusters
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Call it a Pyrrhic victory for Bill Gates. With just one day left before the likely onslaught of a massive, coordinated state and federal antitrust lawsuit, Microsoft is celebrating Tuesday?s U.S. appeals court ruling: that Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson?s restrictions on bundling Internet Explorer with Windows 95 does not apply to Windows 98. Redmond took a hearty crumb of comfort from the ?very significant news,? which the Justice Department promptly brushed aside. ?Our investigation is ongoing,? warned DOJ spokeswoman Gina Talamona. Indeed, a senior official in one state attorney general's office told the New York Times that...
Time was running out. Microsoft had announced plans to release Windows 98 to manufacturers this week. The Department of Justice wanted to file an antitrust suit before that happened. As the hours evaporated, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates asked for a final session in which to plead his case for allowing Windows 98 to be marketed without any Federal Government objections. And so on Tuesday evening, at the headquarters of Microsoft?s Washington lobbyists, Gates met Joel Klein, the department?s top antitrust enforcer...
...most of the talking; Klein had instructed his aides to ?let him have his say.?Gates argued that Microsoft?s contributions to computer technology justified Windows 98?s release, despite the DOJ?s claims that it violated not just a 1995 court agreement but also the basic principles of antitrust policy. Klein held his ground, amazed at Gates? lack of sophistication in realizing to what extent the DOJ?s action might go beyond Windows 98. The two-hour session produced a stalemate. Gates, said insiders, was ?intelligent, forceful and, above all, passionate,? but regulators were deaf to his entreaties...
...right now is just how far along the talks are," says TIME Bonn bureau chief Jordan Bonfante. "A deal like this is very complex -- just look at Rolls Royce and BMW, a much more simple negotiation that has dragged on for months." Other hurdles on the road to wedlock: Antitrust investigations in both Brussels and Washington. Of course, the course of corporate love never did run smooth. And the promise of all those hot sports utility vehicles at Chrysler should keep Daimler on the straight and narrow...
...knows how much it cost Microsoft nemesis Netscape to convince the infamously conservative author of the free-market classic The Antitrust Paradox that Bill Gates is in fact guilty of violating a set of laws that Bork hitherto regarded as contradictory at best and destructive at worst. But as hostilities flare between the software titan and its many foes (the Justice Department, the House and Senate judiciary committees and a flock of state attorneys general are all scrutinizing Microsoft's monopoly power), both sides are hiring whomever it takes to win over public opinion, and price appears...