Pc Makers Stick With Microsoft

Makers of personal computers aren’t budging despite new legal and economic incentives for them to switch from Microsoft’s software for browsing the Internet.

Several large PC companies on Friday said they had no plans to drop Microsoft’s Internet Explorer even though the company agreed one day earlier to let them erase the browser software from computer screens.

The PC makers also said that Netscape’s decision that same day to give away its Navigator browser for free - matching Microsoft’s giveaway of its Internet Explorer - was not enough to sway them.

Analysts said the industry intransigence was a sign Microsoft’s power and influence in the computer market has scarcely waned despite its concession in the government’s antitrust case.

PC makers remained unconvinced that offering Netscape’s browser could attract enough new computer customers to offset several potential downsides. After furiously streamlining their systems for making and selling PCs to cut costs, the manufacturers are hesitant to complicate those processes and possibly drive up costs by switching to another browser.

Internet Explorer is part of “an efficient and cost-effective way” for providing browsers to PC buyers, said T.R. Reid, a spokesman for Dell Computer Corp., the second-largest seller of PCs.

But PC makers declined to comment on what several industry experts cited as a more significant reason: Few are willing to openly offend Microsoft, whose reputation for tough business tactics prompted the government lawsuit in the first place.

“Those people who have the temerity to support Netscape aggressively are at risk,” said Jonathan Jacobson, an antitrust lawyer in New York.

Microsoft said PC makers’ unwillingness to change merely reflected the Internet Explorer’s superior features over Navigator’s.

“This is not about choice. (PC makers) always had the choice to offer both” browsers, said Greg Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman.

The government disagrees, contending that Microsoft threatened to cut off PC makers from its top-selling Windows operating system if they didn’t install Internet Explorer in their machines. Microsoft’s Windows runs the basic functions of 85 percent of the world’s PCs.

Microsoft, capitulating to government demands in a legal skirmish in the broader court battle, on Thursday gave computer makers the option of erasing its Internet browser icon from the face of its Windows 95 operating system.

But experts note that PC makers are already planning their sales of machines equipped with Microsoft’s next-generation operating system, Windows 98, which is expected to tightly integrate the company’s browser, regardless of the outcome of the antitrust case.

PC makers are concluding “the situation hasn’t changed,” said Marc Andreessen, a Netscape cofounder.

“Microsoft can still do all the nasty things it did before.”