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

To: JC Jaros who wrote (49439)	9/16/2000 6:39:18 PM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 74651

JC - re: "This 'personal enablement' myth of the PC" - nothing mythical about it, and it had little to do with monopoly power. PCs enabled end users to control the mix of applications they could execute, where they stored their data, and what capabilities they had, independent of what the IM team dictated. Remember sidekick? I loved that program - cut and paste, take notes, bring it up anywhere, look at your calendar - in many ways, there is nothing currently available which is quite as easy to use, although much of that capability is now in the base OS or in Outlook. Unix systems of the time did not have anything like that kind of desktop capability and were way too intimidating for anyone but geeks to use. That was REAL empowerment, the ability to do what you wanted, how you wanted, with information you controlled locally. As far as the "constant upgrades of the MSFT monopoly machine", the only MSFT software I used for maybe the first 8 years of the PC era was MS-DOS and the 3.1 version at that. I doubt if I ever did a single MSFT upgrade in all that time. I had a CPQ "luggable" in 1983 which pretty much gave me "any time anywhere" access to my stuff, at least anywhere there was a 110 plug (and as long as my arm did not give out). I was even "on line" via compuserve at about that time, and also used a remote access program to get at my PC - and my client's PCs - from almost anywhere. I installed a DTMF cell phone in my car in 1984 and used that and a 2400 baud modem with my luggable to debug client problems from places like the mid-ohio race track parking lot. That was actually pretty capable back in the character-based era. So I am a lot less impressed by all of the "new connectivity" hype, it was doable 16 years ago. Sure, the kinds of content, the universal access, the platform independence of the net era are way nicer. But I would expect us to make at least SOME progress in 16 years.