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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc.
AAPL 259.48+0.5%Jan 30 9:30 AM EST
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To: HerbVic who wrote (56521)9/4/2006 12:56:19 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor  Read Replies (3) of 213183
 
re: Gates

My recollection on Gates is that he seemed to understand simple business concepts at a time when most in the tech industry did not. Doesn't make him a genius, just experienced in some way (not sure where he got this).

Apple would have never even considered licensing their OS and only selling software, because IBM had always been a "systems seller" and there was little perceived value in the software. Gates understood that the software was where the lock was. How did he know this? Not sure. Nobody seemed to "get it" in 1989. Even Ellison at Oracle was concerned about selling only a software product since you could not charge premium prices for databases then and they were so hard to produce. Larry was saved when Unix took hold with its millions of "commodity servers". Maybe both Larry and Bill were more lucky than smart. But this was NOT conventional wisdom at the time, that hardware margins would go to zero and software through the roof.

I am reading a business book on the implosion of Braniff airlines after deregulation. Braniff was the top airline in the world once, the Apple of airlines I guess you'd say. When dereg came down the CEO miscalculated badly and they went under. Another example of a business decision which seems OBVIOUS in retrospect, than many called incorrectly at the time. Thats how software licensing was.
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