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

To: Jason Ellis who wrote (34464)	11/20/1999 9:14:00 AM
From: jim shiau	Respond to of 74651

>If msft did what Intel did (as above), Corel and Lotus would have release their Suite the same date. But Corel can't release their Wordperfect suite until a year later. Can you guess why? I guess when INTC will wait for AMD to release P3, then MSFT will wait for COREL too.

To: Jason Ellis who wrote (34464)	11/20/1999 9:42:00 AM
From: John F. Dowd	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

JE: Absolute Communist madness! Let's see then we can have the oligopolistic oil companies pool their resources and have a committee of commisars or "citizens" decide who pays what price for how much- markets be damned. As for comparing MSFT to a physical hard wirebound state approved monopoly there is no barrier to thought and that is the only barrier to the O/S of tomorrow. You act as if MSFT has a single wire to your brain. Linux says they are this very thing. Are the Finns smarter than the potential U.S. competitors- Hmmm? Notice Torvald did not spend his time at Comdex ranting over MSFT - he invited them to compete in Unix/Linux and MSFT might just do that - their version of Java was superior. By the way my local phone bill went up and since LD calls are discretionary - I was actually harmed by "deregulation" (actually reregulation) of that industry albeit large corporations benefitted. JFD

To: Jason Ellis who wrote (34464)	11/20/1999 1:08:00 PM
From: ed	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

The service charge increased significantly!! Now, they charge big money for checking information !!!!Before I did not make too much long distance call, and I also pay a low service charge, and free of checking information. Now I pay much more service charge, + charge for dialing 411, and I still did not make too many long distant calls, and my total phone bills go up significantly !!!

To: Jason Ellis who wrote (34464)	11/21/1999 4:30:00 AM
From: Larry Sullivan	Respond to of 74651

You mention that Office 95 shipped the same day as Windows 95 and you are correct, but like most people who want to portray Microsoft in a bad light you left off one very important part So did hundreds of other software companies. One thing Microsoft has always done well is work with other software vendors. Larry...

To: Jason Ellis who wrote (34464)	11/21/1999 7:15:00 AM
From: Alan Buckley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

Revisionists of the Corel, Lotus, and IBM history crack me up. They are soooo off the mark. In the early 1990s these guys shot themselves in the foot so often its amazing they're still in business at all. MSFT absolutely begged these companies to write to Windows and their brilliant reply was "nah, we're going to wait and see if it sells" and meanwhile bet the farm on mighty IBM's OS/2. Well, one app group didn't make this colossal blunder...MSFTs. Then, showing up late to the party after all the APIs are coded and out the door they whine that "Gee, MSFTs app group got all this special stuff put in.". Well, duh, MSFTs app group was the only one committed at the time the APIs were defined. Is it any wonder the OS group took pains to put in things their first platform customers needed? Living near MSFTs headquarters in the Seattle area, I've known many MSFT developers personally for years and years and have observed their work environment first hand on a regular basis. Contrary to the popular misconception, the apps groups for the most part use MSDN on their desktops just like external vendors do. There was a period after the famous "Undocumented APIs" book was published where MSFT actually went thru everything and eliminated the relatively few cases of undocumented API usage such that currently 99% of the MSFT apps call only APIs published in MSDN quarterly (plus constant web updates). Further, MSFT bashers overlook the hundreds of special hacks in Windows to make non-MSFT products work, even one's that do incredibly sleazy stuff. I know there are slew of them for Lotus code. MSFT does a much better job on backward compatibility than, for example, AAPL. Be sure to take a close look at MSDN, a huge collection of knowledge about Windows and Windows programming offered for a nominal fee. Now compare to the piece of crap OS/2 DDK for which IBM charged $600. Gee, what a surprise that more apps were written for Windows than OS/2. Why it must be that unfair monopoly power...not!