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Technology Stocks : Citrix Systems (CTXS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark T. Heath who wrote (7117)	11/8/1999 6:19:00 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9068

I don't think MSFT is doing anything to anyone else that Ford isn't doing to GM, I can give an example of how Microsoft's practices affected me. I have been a software developer for many years and one of the tools I needed was a compiler. Compiler's do pretty much the same things and which you choose becomes a matter of personal preference. I chose to use one made by Borland for the PC environment. After Microsoft's nasty breakup with IBM and the Windows 3.1 environment came out Borland issued new compilers for that environment, which I bought an upgrade. Then Microsoft would issue a patch to the system and none of the Borland compiler libraries would work. So I got another upgrade, then there would be a new change to windows and none of the Borland libraries were compatible, so another upgrade was needed. Microsoft never released any information about these upgrades until the day they were released, the Microsoft compilers and libraries were ready on the day of release but Borland had to start developing on that day and couldn't get an upgrade out for several months. They were always behind. I don't think it was because they had poor developers, it was because they couldn't get access to what changes were commining up until the changes were released. Microsoft always had a 3-6 month advantage and eventually I had to switch to Microsoft compilers to remain competative. Borland went out of the compiler business after a couple years. I lost money spent on upgrades, time to market opportunity, and the learning expense of the microsoft format of function interfaces, and the actual time spent changing the code to Microsoft standards. TP