At 11:31 AM 6/29/98 +0000, attila wrote:
there is only one _sane_ course of action against M$: divestiture --before Gates becomes the Hydra. [...] the real issue is not the 90% of the OS market, it is the 95% (expected to grow to 98% before 2000) of the office s/w. the office software, available _only_ on M$ platforms creates a self-perpetuating juggernaut: no other OS can even begin to make market penetraton without the key product (office s/w) --and people are not willing to learn a new application-- that's just human nature.
Attlia - you'd probably enjoy reading "Barbarians Led By Bill Gates", a recent book by some MS ex-insiders on how MS became what it is. Windows 3.0, for instance, wasn't supposed to muscle out OS/2, but the developers of Word/Excel/Powerpoint (which they originally wrote for the Macintosh) got better development/porting support from the small group of developers on the low-status backwater leftover Windoze team than from the high-profile IBM OS/2 partnership, and Win3.0 was ready to ship when they were, unlike the upcoming insanely great next version of OS/2. When it sold a million copies in a few months, Gates had to deal with it, and suddenly Windows became a strategic product again, and gradually OS/2 became the leftover.
is using his cash cow, swollen by gouging the consumer, to
Gates has only gouged consumers by selling us crap which we buy, either because we need compatibility with other users of their products, or because we work for big companies who have centralized decision- making droids who buy it. Better than Gates tells my corporate droids what to buy than Janet Reno, Louis Freeh, or FCCmeister Kennard. Not only do they have even less taste, but they'd solve the problem by taking a long time to do the spec, which wouldn't have enough details to interoperate with anything except the National Information Infrastructure Data Entry Escrow Protocol. Personally, I disliked WordPerfect immensely (though I last used it back when it and MSWord were character-based), and Word has acquired enough features to be about as flaky and unpredictable as WP was back then. Excel is friendly, and I don't use s preadsheets enough to prefer something else. Powerpoint reeks, and the integration between Word and Powerpoint reeks badly.
acquire _significant_ interests in industries which use computers: cable networks, cellular networks, satellite networks, etc. and related industries dependent on communications: news (MSNBC), television, productions,
Good for him - would you rather he spent the money acquiring other parts of the software industry or Seattle real estate? He also spent a pile of money trying to outflank the Internet with MSN, and lost badly. Are you still running Microsoft BoB? Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639