Hi John,

Microsoft has already been a part of an anti-trust suit. I'm not sure if that has all been settled, and exactly what remedies the court has imposed. I think Microsoft is a monopoly.

It seems to me that the company should be split to bring back free and fair compitetion between products. It seems unfair that microsoft could handicap one product so that it could extract a greater profit from another product at the consumer expense. The consumer should be able to make the choice about what products it wants base on its needs and the overall value of the goods and services. If Microsoft somehow distorted this free market by forceing consumers to choose one particular product to further its monopolistic control of the market at large, then it may be time to talk to our legislators about our concerns.

Also, companies like Sun, IBM, Dbase, etc could bring a anit-trust suit to ensure that consumer have a free choice as to what products it wants, and that there is some reasonable relation between how much a product costs Microsoft to produce relative to how much Microsoft can charge for it. As you know, once a company achieve a monopoly it tend to raise the price of its product because the cunsumer has no other choices. In achieving the monopoly, a company may use predatory pricing to eliminate compitition by giving its product away or pricing its product below what it cost to produce, but once the company has eliminated the competition, it will extort a high price for the goods or services. I hate to see Microsoft lose interest in VB and VFP, because it wants to own the new OS called the internet. I also hate to see the consumer asked to pay so high a price for this new OS. Usually the consumer is asked not only to buy the new operating system, but the cunsumer must usually buy a new computer to handle it. We had better batten down the hatches, because we are in for some mighty rough seas as Microsoft morphs its OS Windows to .Net in a never ending waves of change. In the end the end user will be hurt because it is the end user who Microsoft will ask to pay the price when everything is said and done.