Oh right, the freeware thingy is so much better and pure. Pity those uninformed lawyers and doctors charging fees for their services and then driving home in the BMW with the beautiful blonde.
Uh, earth to Ed? You know, people used to pay for Netscape software, till Microsoft set the price of browsers to 0. Paul Maritz's air supply thing. It was a best seller! It was what the customers wanted! On the other hand, Bill himself said giving away software was communist, but that was in an older revisionist history than the current one. Free probably isn't cheap enough to displace Windows, anyway. The nice thing about "open source", though, is that you can actually fix things, or have your staff fix things, or hire somebody to fix things. With Bill's "Windows is open" software (open like war is peace, etc.), well, when a "known issue" shows up, (after a few $200 phone calls of course) you better hope it's something you can work around. If not, you might end up like those sailors on the Yorktown, getting towed into port. At least in peacetime, let's hope they don't have to face the "blue screen of death" during a shooting war. (ref: gcn.com )
Of course, most of the cost of software, Microsoft's or anybody elses, isn't in acquisition, it's keeping it running over the long term. The TCO studies don't show Microsoft products to be a particularly good deal on that front, but they're all wrong, and Bill's got a solution for that anyway, maybe NT5, due sometime in the next millennium I think. They bet the company on it!
Cheers, Dan. |
