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

To: Gerald Walls who wrote (32897)	11/8/1999 12:07:00 AM
From: Brian Malloy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Gerald, It's starting to get like the old MSFT haters reunion now. Our old friend Cheryl Williamson has arrived back from an extended hiatus to entertain us. <ggg> To bad Arno still isn't posting. If he is still monitoring SI he must be going stir crazy about now.

To: Gerald Walls who wrote (32897)	11/8/1999 1:36:00 AM
From: cheryl williamson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Gerald, I think I've answered this already but here goes again, Sun, IBM, HWP, and Apple make their own hardware. The hardware design is patented and owned by their respective companies. No one is allowed to go out and sell an Ultra-based server without Sun's licensing approval. They make their O/S to go with the hardware, but they make money selling the hardware. Even if they sell apps to go with the systems they sell, they are not a signifcant part of their companies revenue streams. In fact, they can give away the apps and still make their margins. PC's are qualitatively different and have been since their inception. They were purposely designed by IBM then donated to the public domain to introduce price competition from any number of vendors who wanted to assemble what was an off-the-shelf product. Since PC's are inherently cheap computers, they sell lots of units. There is no reason for anyone selling a desktop O/S (even RedHat) to NOT want to get into the applications business because they can't make money selling proprietary computer hardware (which is by definition more expensive than an off-the-shelf product). If you want to be a PC vendor of software and make money, you have to sell apps, hopefully to lots of people. What better way to do that than to tie your apps to your own O/S and lock out the competition?????? I hope you can see, Gerald, that that is problematic, by definition. cheers, cherylw