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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stormweaver who wrote (19147)	9/1/1999 9:39:00 PM
From: CHRIS YOUNG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

James, Why would helping Corel or Applix be in Sun's self-interest? Enjoy, C

To: Stormweaver who wrote (19147)	9/1/1999 9:47:00 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

The public has choosen Windows since it is the best provides the best desktop metaphor Oh come now, James. Do you remember 1981 when the IBM PC came out? Maybe at that time your were still more interested in Playboy than PC Week. Anyway, the original IBM PC had 3 operating systems. The consumer had a choice! It was good old market Darwinism! One was MS-DOS. It was free in the box with the system unit. One was CPM-86. It cost $60 in 1981 dollars, about $150 today. The third was the intrepid UCSD P-System, which also cost you some money and would do even less than the other two, only slower (but it was platform independent!). Guess what happened. I bet you can do it in one guess. If we had been discussing this at that time, a Microsoft admirer might have said: "The public has chosen Microsoft because it provides the best command-line A-prompt experience." (Remember there were no hard disks at first.) That would have had as much meaning as your statement about Windows. Microsoft has done nothing for 18 years but artfully exploit the critical market mass that IBM handed to Bill G. on day one of the Intel PC industry's existence. Part of this exploitation, a large enough part to attract the attention of the U.S. Government on not one but multiple occasions, has relied on illegal contract provisions in restraint of trade, using the premier position they were handed to bully their partners and customers into making sure that competing products were never given the same accidental advantage that they got in 1981. Microsoft is not known, or chosen by anyone, for the quality of its products. The "choice" that you can point to is window dressing on the truth of Microsoft's monopoly. Regards, --QwikSand

To: Stormweaver who wrote (19147)	9/4/1999 5:09:00 AM
From: Byron Xiao	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

The public chose Windows because the dirty strong arm tatics dirty Bill used against IBM in the early 80s about putting an ugly DOS OS onto IBM PCs. The public chose Windows because the mishap by Apples and IBM OS2. Windows is a sucky, buggy product that most people I knew do not like. Bill stole Windows idea from Xerox. Frankly, as an investor, I don't give a shit about how MSFT made its money. MSFT is my 3rd largest holding behind SUNW and DELL. I don't care much about ethics when it comes down to investing. However, at work, I stayed away from MSFT product as much as possible. I used Linux, Solaris, HP-UX at work. We didn't base our decision on ethics, we based our decision on quality of the product. After using MSFT visual studio for a while and getting a "service pack" every quarter to fix bugs and still couldn't get the product right, we just had enough of it. Visual studio as a development tool has a nice user interface, but sucks big time in debugging network apps, multi-threaded apps which we do all the time. It's a low quality product just like the rest of the MSFT products. They might be able to fool an average joe blow like you, but they aren't going to fool a software architect like me. Message #19147 from James Nicoll at Sep 1 1999 9:12PM Read this one slowly Tiqueer - Microsoft does not have a monopoly OS position - there always have been other choices in the X86 operating system space and there is even more in the last few years as Solaris x86 and Linux have made their debut. The public has choosen Windows since it is the best provides the best desktop metaphor The crux of the matter is giving away software for free that other companies are charging for. Giving away Star won't help Corel or Applix too much.