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

To: Mitch Blevins who wrote (29176)	9/5/1999 10:52:00 PM
From: John F. Dowd	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

MB: Are you saying that they bought out a company to give away a stand alone version of Star Office? This is an interesting and very altruistic business model. One would assume that SUNW would split it into a client server item to encourage the purchase of their servers just as MSFT gave away IE so that when incorporated into subsequent OS it enhances the totality of the overall market offering and helps to sell the flagship product. If on the other hand this is to be SUNW's vindictive (get MSFT at any cost) game plan then they will be reducing their margins considerably or will have to charge more for their servers. Expensive revenge. I guess I am missing the point as to why SUNW would give this software away without any connection to their server or is it being sold as an adjunct to their workstation sales effort. AAPL has sort of done this by selling their OS bundled with their hardware in order to sell the hardware which has not put them in the forefront of the software pack. To be quite honest I miss SUNW's point, yours or both. JFD