The reason Microsoft is valuable is because it has all kinds of
ingredient to make a delicious dish, make the product much better than the competitors and with much lower price
But Microsoft runs in business units (ever-changing though they may be) that are really quite distinct. Its possible -- even likely -- that a person could work for years on Office and never meet a person who works on Windows. The design, development, and even marketing of those two groups and others wouldn't change much if it was done under a separate company. (And one better hope, for the sake of future trials, that Microsoft doesn't actually bundle products in quite the way you suggest they do.)
There is, however, convergence at the top and at the bottom. There's a single management and a single support infrastructure. That would all change. Each group have to find its own best markets and management would focus just on maximizing profit from that one group. There would be some high initial costs when duplicating the support infrastructure, but some of that could probably be handled by a service company similar to BellCore.
Here's two quick examples of how the consumer might benefit: The OS group or groups would be able to look around and decide how best to give their customers what they want. They might, for instance, make a deal to bundle something like StarOffice or SmartSuite with the OS -- giving users a full applications suite for far less than they'd pay for Office. Or they might decide to meld a db into the OS and even give users a gui to that database. That might destroy the market for Office Pro with Access, but that's not their concern anymore.
The Office company might look at how well their own Macintosh unit does and decide to make a deal with Caldera or RedHat to include Linux in an LinOffice package. Either of those groups could decide to make their own browser, or get one from IE, Mozilla, or Spyglass -- all of whom would be forced to follow open standards. |
