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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Just_Observing who wrote (29055)	9/2/1999 11:17:00 AM
From: johnd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Just observing: Star office worries me as well. On the on hand I feel positive about win2000. But nearer term, especially fiscal for 2000 I worry a lot about microsoft.

To: Just_Observing who wrote (29055)	9/2/1999 2:19:00 PM
From: Mitch Blevins	Respond to of 74651

>>Star Office already has 30% of the German market. That's quite a chunk given that the software was not free until recently<< You should note that StarOffice was free for personal use long before Sun bought it, which probably helped some of its German marketshare. It was fairly cheap to businesses also (enough to be negligible). The only boost that it gets now from Sun is alot of publicity, and a larger name-brand to back it up. Also the license (Sun Community Source License) is one not very well liked by developers, so you probably won't see any acceleration of devlopment just because they have open source code now. The poor license choice like this is one of the reasons that the Netscape/Mozilla development has been taking so long. Just some observations... -Mitch

To: Just_Observing who wrote (29055)	9/2/1999 6:14:00 PM
From: codawg	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

>>Is it true that MSFT gets 40% of revenues from Office?<< I don't understand this question. MSFT gets 100% of the revenue when they sell a license for Office. Due to their conservative accounting practices they recognize less than the 100% initially, but I think the number is more like 60%. They recognize the rest in later quarters amortized over a period which I believe is 3 years. If you are talking about the percent of MSFT revenues that Office represents, then I think the 40$% number is high. I think Office sales account for something like 25-30% of revenue in a given quarter. Worrying about Star is ridiculous (for us - not for Gates and crew). I could write a long post on the reasons, but it is definitely a niche product.