Jalali,
You say reference potential WEB based Office Suites from IBM, Oracle, Sun and Corel that, "These could be priced at one tenth's the price MSFT is charging." So what? Borland with Quattro Pro and even Lotus in the past with its products have taken this route. It is clear for all to see where this type of pricing strategy led them.
Business doesn't just buy software on price alone. It's a combination of support agreements, train up cost of workers, viability of the company and the potential for future upgrades among other things.
Sun and Oracle have a long way to go if they plan to compete against MSFT and its army of independent software providers who write to MSFTs API's utilize VB, and on and on. You just don't reproduce that type of network over night.
IBM, they try hard, but they couldn't take on MSFT head to head in OS or applications. They bought LOTUS, a company which MSFT had already chewed up pretty good. They thought they had something in Lotus Notes but the internet smashed any hope that it had. Now almost eighteen months after MSFT is fully committed to the WEB and is shipping product you actually want to tell me that the bumbling duo of LOTUS and IBM are going to take the desktop from MSFT with a cheap WEB based Office Suite?
Corel, almost doesn't deserve mention. It is still trying to wicker together its amalgamation of software products such as Word Perfect (I used to use it several years ago - now, its only WORD for me) that MSFT has trounced in the past.
Also, be more specific about MSFTs revenue shortfall that you speak of. I don't think we are looking at the same financial documents or listening to the same conference calls.
Regards,
Brian
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