It’s surprising that nobody – at least as far as we know – has yet tried to link the El Nino weather phenomenon with the threat of a delay in the shipment of Windows 98, but we’ll just have to wait and see if the sun starts shining when the OS finally ships to clarify the importance of the new release. In the meantime, Microsoft Corp supporters continue to spout prophecies of doom over the threat of a delay and the rain continues to fall. Latest is Hewlett-Packard Co’s chief executive Lew Platt, who told the Nihon Keizai Shimbun in Japan this week that the US stock market will suffer if its doesn’t ship on time and HP itself could lose hundreds of million of dollars in the Justice Department slaps a suit on Redmond. He predicted sales falling across the entire high-tech industry, thus calling technology stocks to plunge, dragging the rest of the market down with them. One of the many curious things about all this hand-wringing by the PC hardware and software industry is that many large PC makers are swallowing the cost offering users a free upgrade to the OS at least for a limited period. BancAmerica Robertson Stephens’ enterprise hardware analyst Brett Rekas described last week’s Microsoft rally that gathered together about 50 vendors in support of the OS upgrade thus: The self-righteous litany was ridiculous, in our view. Regarding Microsoft’s frequently-repeated claim that Justice is trying to stunt innovation if it delays Windows 98’s release Rekas says: Microsoft has never been an innovator or a pioneer, but a very adept marketing machine. Almost every product from MS-DOS to Windows to Internet Explorer was acquired or copied. As the supplier of the de-facto standard PC operating system, we believe Microsoft has stifled innovation and manipulated the pace of development to its advantage. However, Rekas believes the market should be left to decide Windows 98’s fate, not the government or competitors who wish to bring lawsuits against Microsoft. He warns that Sun Microsystems Inc chief Scott McNealy in particular may be playing with fire by encouraging the government to investigate Microsoft’s practices: Next, some bureaucrat may decide to investigate Sun’s supervision of Java, warns Rekas.
