Microsoft's proposal last year to merge with SAP reveals a somewhat desperate Microsoft, anxious to gain a huge footprint in enterprise applications as other sources of revenue are under siege. Given Microsoft's past dealings with the Department of Justice, I wonder how easily the company could get past federal regulators with such as merger. Subsequent to the SAP talks, Microsoft reportedly gave a sworn statement to the DOJ that it wouldn't compete in the upper tier of the enterprise software market for two years. Is Microsoft flip-flopping--or just confused about its own stategy? On one hand, the company wanted to buy its way into the enterprise apps market with SAP; then it says that it won't enter the market for a while--which tends to give succor to the DOJ's antitrust gambit of opposing Oracle's hostile bid for PeopleSoft.