October 14, 1994

Companies Microsoft is poised to dominate personal finance software, the only niche of the software market it does not already lead, by agreeing to acquire Intuit Inc., the producer of the Quicken program, in a stock swap valued at $1.5 billion. The deal would be the largest software acquisition ever. [ Page D1. ]

WHEN the International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show first opened in Manhattan six years ago, droves of Europe's top dealers leaped at the chance to exhibit at the Seventh Regiment Armory. Since most of their best customers were Americans, the chance to give them shop-at-home service seemed irresistible. And it was. For the first time, America had a showplace that rivaled Grosvenor House in London, Maastrict in the Netherlands and the Biennale in Paris. This year's fair, which opens today and runs through Thursday, still ranks with those extravaganzas. Viewers have a chance to see objects as varied as a third-century A.D. Roman glass bottle for $120, a 1944 Picasso oil for $435,000 and a $3.5 million Chinese bronze. It's also a place to follow current fashions in collecting. (Asian art is hot right now; so are Continental furniture and animal jewelry.)

In a reversal, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed today that mutual fund prospectuses include a single-page summary of the risks and expenses that investors face. In a separate action, the commission approved new disclosure rules for the annual proxy statements that mutual funds issue to investors.

Matsushita's responses to the prospect of selling its Hollywood film and entertainment company, MCA Inc., have ranged from the poetic to the cryptic, but they have always conveyed the same meaning. "Matsushita has purchased a beautiful and tasty apple," Tsuzo Murase, the executive in Osaka, Japan, who oversees the movie operation, said in March, when rumors were circulating that the parent company, the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, was considering selling a stake in MCA to John C. Malone, the powerful cable television executive. "If half the apple is cut and sold, the remaining half would not be as tasty."

If the peaceful revolution against East German Communism had a birthplace, it may well have been the Nikolai Church in Leipzig, where the Rev. Christian Fuhrer organized weekly "prayers for peace" that grew into vast street demonstrations in which tens of thousands of protesters took part. Today, Mr. Fuhrer looks back with justifiable pride on the movement he helped lead, but like many of his neighbors he also laments some of what German unification has brought.