LAST week’s court order to split Microsoft into two companies could
strengthen the software giant’s grasp on the Internet, says Jim Clark, the
founder of arch-rival Netscape. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s landmark ruling
to divide Bill Gates’s firm into separate businesses—one for its operating
systems, the other for software applications and Web programs—is intended
to curb its monopoly. But Clark reasons that by keeping the Internet Explorer
browser under the same roof as other Web services, Microsoft could gain a
stranglehold on the Net.
Clark’s solution would be to keep IE and Windows together. “The browser is to…
