As I write this, I am on my way to Redmond, Wash., to hear about Microsoft's moves into wireless communications. That the company would make a high-profile push into a new lateral market on one coast while it is in the midst of a major antitrust trial on the other is a testament to the legendary aggressiveness of its founder. And it's only the most visible of many recent examples of Microsoft's competitiveness.
To wit: Microsoft recently stretched its product line to include a kilobyte-class operating system for smart cards on one hand and a gigabyte-thick OS for data-center servers on the other. In between, it rolled out an embedded package that could power printers, routers, switches or PBX systems.
The company has also been vocal in standards activities of late. It spearheaded a drive to define transmission and file formats for electronic books. It took a lead role in crafting an applications programming interface for home networking, and it found the time to define an API for data-acquisition gear.
Almost incidentally, Microsoft "went national" with Sidewalk, a Web portal that contains everything from yellow pages to news. The news feed comes from MSNBC-which on a recent afternoon featured a special section with "complete coverage" of the Clinton sex scandal but ran only a single feature story on Microsoft's own antitrust trial-a lighthearted piece painting some colorful nuances of the courtroom drama courtesy of Microsoft's Webzine, Slate.
Oh, and Microsoft just announced its third-quarter net income climbed an amazing 58 percent over the previous year, on a revenue increase of 26 percent. At a time when the PC industry is being mercilessly hammered by falling system and component prices, those results are embarrassingly good.
So does anyone think there just might be some kind of antitrust situation here? Not on Wall Street, apparently, where one top analyst recently wrote of the Microsoft trial that "we don't expect, even under the worst-case outcome, that we will be forced to reduce our EPS estimates for the company."
That confidence level among the financial community rises in inverse proportion to the concerns in the design community that Windows could be closing down all around them.
