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"Big Bad Microsoft -- Where Have You Gone?"

By James J. Cramer
RealMoney Columnist
3/19/2004 9:06 AM EST


"Looks to me as if the government won that big Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq - commentary - research) decision a few years back.


It won, because Microsoft's no longer doing the obvious things it needs to do to build its businesses. It won because Microsoft has the greatest asset in the world, cash, and it can't put it to good use. It won because I just don't think the Europeans would be this meddlesome if they weren't inspired by the U.S. Justice Department.

If you need evidence of how the government broke the spirit of Microsoft, just read the stories about X-Box in this morning's papers.

First, a little background. I play video games with my kids. Some of them are fabulous, particularly the schoolyard basketball and football games and any of the wacky Simpsons games. I play them on X-Box. I bought X-Box after trying out Playstation and watching a lot of Nintendo on my neighbor's console. I judged it to be superior to the other offerings.

Immediately, I realized there aren't enough games on X-Box vs. the other guys. This shortage has been ameliorated as of late but we like to try out games from Blockbuster before we buy them, and there is still a chronic X-Box cartridge shortage.

It's also harder to get them at Gamestop, the place I shop for games. (I know I could go on line to buy them but the Gamestop is next to the supermarket I stop in on the way home from work to pick up the groceries.)

Today, I read that Microsoft is going to cut the price of X-Box by some $20-$30 in order to encourage more use and more developers to write software for X-Box. And I said to myself, where is the old Microsoft we knew and feared, the one that would do the logical thing and charge some predatory price for X-Box, maybe $35 for the whole shooting match? Where is the Microsoft that would stuff cash into developers' hands to make X-Box games and no others! Where is the Microsoft that would write a billion-dollar check to Best Buy and anybody else to make sure that Nintendo's stuck in the back and Playstation's not ordered aggressively when current editions run out?

Where is the Microsoft that can seek and buy dominance and shut out everyone, the one that by this point should have 85% of the gamebox market, leaving 15% to throw Justice off the scent?

Yeah, that Microsoft is gone, left in the wake of Joel Klein's Justice Department, which changed the behavior of Microsoft once and for all.

Its pathetic and lame pricing of Xbox (something it could give away for heaven's sake by rebating you $200 in cartridge coupons to get you started) shows you that this Microsoft is, truly, to borrow a great phrase from Nixon, "a pitiful helpless giant."

I wish I could call the X-Box behavior isolated. But Microsoft's bizarre and continually wasteful $10 billion experiment in cable and TV without anything to show for it -- let alone dominance -- is still one more example of a company that has lost its way.

Finally, its inability to make up its mind about its special dividend, something that will be drawn out for as long as the EU keeps things on hold, resembles a company that is doddering and confused, not bold and aggressive.

Could that, too, be explained by a change in culture brought about by the government's prosecution? Maybe. Years of being in the Justice Department's crosshairs has a remarkable way of making someone irresolute.

So, forgive me for my nostalgia for the bad old Microsoft. But if you are a shareholder, watching this slow motion photography lesson between $24.5 and $25.5, you know exactly what I am talking about. "

(in www.realmoney.com)