Stak, >>>Does MSFT have competition the way Intel has?<<<
NO. Intel has very little competition.
Whereas MSFT has :
O/S= HP, SUNW, IBM, AT&T.....
Internet/Intranet = Netscape, Lotus Notes
LAN = Novell, Bayan
Online = America Online, Compuserve
DBMS = Oracle, Sybase, Informix
Desktop software = Apple/Claris, IBM/Corel, Borland, Symantec, Intuit
Multimedia - Intuit, Broderbund, Disney
Broadcasting, TimeWarner, CNN, Fox, Disney, GE, .....
On top of this, people in the Far East don't want to pay for software. If they don't just copy or steal it - they will just rewrite it.
If you think software is cheap or easy to to produce - it use to be calculated on the basis of Lines of Code - a typical $100,000 a year programmer produces on average maybe 24 lines of code per day. There are maybe several trillion lines of code in existence today. The metrics may be a little different today, but the idea and productivity is the same.
Besides, programmers get sick, have babies, take vactions, and sometimes slack off and even walks off the job. And, beleive it or not, some programmers are incompetent and can't get the job done, or do it so poorly, that it is virtually unusable.
Also, there may be several hundred Mark Andriessens coming out of college each year and MSFT has to wait to see who comes out with the next Navigator (so they can copy it).
Yours (the ever humble),
Mary Cluney
(Sorry about that Carl) |
