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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mauser96 who wrote (24071)	5/2/2000 11:46:00 AM
From: Michael Kimmel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

If MST was to be split, I believe that the issue of opening up the APIs to the OS would be moot...they would have to do it. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for the OS side of the house...might help it. Lord knows that with the wireless economy coming...they're going to need all the help they can get. On the other hand, their applications side of the house would then be faced with something they have not really had to deal with....competition. I'm also a software engineer, by the way.

To: mauser96 who wrote (24071)	5/2/2000 12:04:00 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

it should open up the playing field. This is the desired outcome in my opinion. If this happens it would be great for the OS division. Immense value chains would be added. There will be one problem for them that they don't have now, They won't be able to change interfaces as quickly as they do now. Their current strategy seems to be to continuously modify the interface and the applications together, offering upgrades and downloads to keep this more or less transparent to the user. A published interface would require backwards compatibility for a longer amount of time. Still the OS would be more entrenched for quite a while. Eventually interface compatible OSs could become available, but MSFT would have a huge head start on them. The application side is a little more uncertain. MSFT would probably still dominate Office and other high volume applications. They may get boxed into a niche though. Right now they can choose when and if they offer a new application (ELON interface for example). If a hundred new software companies spring up, these new possible applications will all start springing up more or less at once. Microsoft programmers are good but they could never keep up with all the ideas, some good some bad, that would hit the market. Without the changing interface the MSFT programs that come late (for example visual and photo publishing, once dominated by Corel but being squeezed by new MSFT offerings and an ever changing undocumented interface) would have a harder time displacing dominate players. Some next big thing will likely be dominated by another, yet unknown, company. I guess I see a Gorilla and a King resulting from a sucessfull breakup. The King could be a Gorilla if MSFT cooperated in the breakup and aligned the divisions instead of letting the judge choose the point of separation. TP