Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (49787)	9/24/2000 5:06:29 PM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Microsofts way of making money is the same as every other successful company's. It has (amongst others) the following ingredients: - Make sure that people who sell or promote your product get rich. - Make sure that customers feel that they made a good deal. - Try to increase the end customer's budget for buying your products. - Try to make the end customer spend money on your product instead of other products, consultancy etc. - Make sure, that buying your product will make it the most obvious choice to buy other of your products. etc.etc.etc. When you look at how most companies changed from DOS to Windows, their budgets increased significantly during the change. They had no big problem with it, because they felt that each workplace got significant new value. We have made lots of money on this, and it kept competitors out of the market. For instance, you pay a license for each user on a NT Network, no matter how many NT Servers you have. If you introduce a server of a different kind, you still have to pay Microsoft the per-user license. So any competing server technology cannot be introduced, if this also requires a per-user license. There is only one way that Microsoft can lose the market: If the competing product doesn't cost a per-user license, is at least as good, is compatible, and makes the resellers rich. Linux does this, because it costs no licenses, is Windows compatible for many solutions (servers, internet etc.), is more stable, and makes resellers rich. We can sell more consulting hours on Linux than we can on Windows, and still be cheaper and better than a Windows solution. The market needs a reason to introduce something else than Microsoft, because the MS software licenses are not extremely big for many big companies, and it is often difficult to explain why a company should use something else than Microsoft. But here, the magazines, the internet etc. help Linux, because magazines have much more to write about in Linux than in Windows. Microsoft doesn't tell everybody about kernel details, driver details, how they do programming etc. Linux developers do, which makes it much easier to write Linux articles than Windows articles. So Linux is much better covered in magazines, simply because Magazines earn more money on Linux than Windows. Since every IT department reads magazines, they get interested in Linux and want to try it out. What keeps Linux growing is the high customer satisfaction. There is no big trouble with running Linux servers, and when you are able to sell more consulting hours, the customer feels they get more for their money. They pay less, see more experts around and the systems are stable. And any problem can be solved deterministically, unlike Windows. Microsoft will have a very hard time ahead, and I think they will focus more on software quality from now on, and less on features. Remember all this "freeware" crap you could download for Windows once? Often it was very buggy software, and really demonstrated, why you should pay for your software. Today, the GNU software delivers high quality software for no money, and the distributions make sure, that you get alle the free software, that is good, and keeps bad software out of the system. When you experience that Microsoft Internet Explorer cannot download a file, but wget can, you start thinking about why you pay Microsoft for their software, when GNU software is better quality. Linux FTP also often succeeds where Windows 2000 command line FTP fals. Not to mention MSIE5 FTP, which is horrible, just horrible. And I still miss a ZIP-program in standard Windows 2000.