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[Heather Hesketh <heather AT hesketh.com>]

At 12:20 PM 9/8/2001 -0400, Steven Champeon wrote:
>
>No, he's saying that if your company is successful and then goes on
>to protect its success through illegal means the reward is
>litigation.

I'd like to add that I'm surprised at how so many people get in such an 
uproar about this case. They take it so much further than the government 
stepping in to try to protect the consumer and our economy against a 
monopoly that abuses it's power. The rules that a monopoly has to play by 
are more strict than the rest of the world. A monopoly is on top, which 
means that they can affect the market in such sweeping ways by just being 
that we've put into place laws to protect from that. Monopoly cases like 
this aren't about companies not being able to use hardball tactics to 
compete. It's about companies that are already "there" abusing their 
position to squelch competition and, therefore, according to our 
capitalist system, squelch innovation and the "natural" mechanisms for 
controlling price.

The question to ask yourself is, "Should the queen be able to do this?" 
The question is *not*, "Should someone who wants to be queen do this?" If 
you want to be queen, you do the things Microsoft has done to become 
queen. Once you have that position, then you act befitting a queen. You 
protect your power, but you don't abuse it. If you abuse it, the only 
power bigger (supposedly) than you in our country, our government, has the 
right to tell you to behave and to enforce this behavior.

Heather

--
Heather A. Hesketh                 http://www.hesketh.com
CEO                                vox: 919.834.2552 x12
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