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

To: dybdahl who wrote (57318)	4/13/2001 5:41:40 PM
From: Rusty Johnson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Five Questions with Eric Raymond The most prominent and influential advocate of open source software shares his views on the future of the movement. business2.com What do you think Microsoft will look like five years from now? An investment bank. According to their 10Qs, Microsoft's software division revenues have been dropping for the last three quarters; they've covered this with income from other lines of business. The economic slowdown is going to hurt them, because software buyers looking to cut costs will naturally gravitate to alternatives that don't inflict high annual license fees. But their biggest problem is that shrinking margins in the hardware market are undermining their business model; the original equipment manufacturers they depend on are going to have to bail out of the Microsoft camp before too long in order to keep any profits at all. ... What's the most important issue in the open source community this year? The desktop. Nautilus, the Linux desktop built by the Macintosh interface team, has just come out. It's being integrated into GNOME, which is maturing. OpenOffice has the potential to compete head-to-head against Microsoft Office and win. When somebody finds the right talent and the right business model to integrate and service all these pieces, we'll have a serious shot at breaking Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop. And they know it, which is why (Microsoft's Platforms Group Vice President) Jim Allchin and (Microsoft CEO) Steve Ballmer are running around trying to portray us as communist flake cases. Which stereotype of the open source community ticks you off the most? The communist flake-case one. Allchin describing us as "un-American" and Ballmer deriding Linux as a "toy" are blatantly self-serving propaganda directed at what Microsoft has acknowledged in antitrust court as its most severe competitive threat. In fact, the open-source community is more libertarian than left--and in building such things as the Internet and the worldwide Web we've demonstrated more capacity for long-term sustained effort than any corporate manager with his eye on the next quarterlies can sustain.