Well written. You have made my argument for me. A few comments....
<First of all, the economics on Unix systems is very different. It would cost a lot more to provide these applications under UNIX than under MSFT OSes.>
Excuses. You said there was no competition, I said there was. I never said the competition was as good.
<Moreover, the Unix versions of these products is often not as good as the MSFT versions, and is often much more out-of-date. The products are developed for MSFT, then later, it *might* be ported to UNIX or some other OS. Also, don't tell me that you have nearly as much choice of applications on any other OS as you do with MSFT. That is the draw of MSFT - the availability of applications.>
More excuses.
<Only MSFT has a platform that will provide all the applications that an organization needs. Other solutions would require a mixed-platform environment, which is much more expensive to maintain.>
And more excuses....
<So, given the economics, application-availability, and safety of choosing MSFT, almost no-one would choose anything else. Yes, they do have a choice, but by making other choices, one has to sacrifice a lot. >
The next excuse???
<Also note that most of the advantages that MSFT has over others is not a result of MSFT's own doing (e.g. creating great products), but more having to do with their monopoly status, which they have enjoyed for most of the time they have been in business.>
This is definitely not true. MSFT's power did not truly manifest itself until Windows 2.0/3.0. That is when they started writing REAL applications for thier then unaccepted graphical interface. The market was betting on OS/2, and MSFT out executed IBM, Lotus, Wordperfect and Ashton-Tate in bringing superior apps to the new and still not universally accepted GUI. The monopoly status at that time belonged to Wordperfect for wordprocessors, Lotus for spreadsheets, and Ashton-Tate for desktop databases. In this quaduplex's attempt to "bully" the market into a new, different OS, they left the oppurtunity open for a swift, aggressive, smart young company to beat them to market. Enter Micorsoft. The aforementioned quadruplex refused to write apps for the new Windows GUI, so MSFT wrote them all on thier own. By the time the others caught the wave, it was too late. MSFT brought best of breed products to market faster than those that had the existing monopoly, thus toppling them from thier monopolistic post. MSFT also executed superior strategy in anticipating what the market wanted in GUI's, to the detriment of IBM, A-T, Lotus, and Wordperfect.
Like I said in my earlier post, you are confusing the words victory and monopoly. All of the superior attributes that you attributed to MSFT in the statements that I quoted from you in the beginning of the post are due to MSFT outmaneuvering the competition and gaining superior economies of scale, thus leveraging the synergies to be had in increasing returns.
RCM
rcmfinancial.com |
