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

To: Dave who wrote (60795)	8/24/2001 2:40:52 AM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Hmmm... you are right. I did. As Microsoft continues this path, they abandon computer nerds as customers. Lars.

To: Dave who wrote (60795)	8/24/2001 9:23:40 AM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Re: PDF "standard" PDF is a "standard" in the same sense that Word is a standard. It is a proprietary product owned and controlled by a single company (in this case Adobe) which has won wide acceptance in the market by virtue of its technical capabilities combined with great marketing. As a matter of fact, the Acrobat reader is bundled with most new PCs and has been for quite some time. As has been pointed out, its easy access on the web has also been very widely publicized.

To: Dave who wrote (60795)	8/24/2001 3:01:10 PM
From: Milan Shah	Respond to of 74651

Sure you do. PDF is a standard. MSFT can't control it, so it's not strategically important to them, and the consumer be damned. It's as simple as that. They've always worked that way. Cross-platform standards that are out of their control are their enemy, as is the consumer. Microsoft doesn't own nor control the public-key open standards, yet IE comes with a good implementation of https out of the box. Microsoft doesn't own nor control the Kerberos protocol, HTTP protocol, HTML specification, SMTP etc., yet it comes standard with those. Like any other business, Microsoft has finite resources, and every day, it tries to figure out a strategy to apply those resources so as to maximize their profits. PDF writing is interesting to those customers that actually publish information. It turns out a vast majority (as a fraction) of Windows customers primarily consume information, and don't publish much. Its hardly surprizing to me that Microsoft would not devote resources to building and supporting one. As far as PDF viewing, its still about the same case. I'd still argue that the vast majority of Windows customers never encounter a web-site with PDF content. The number that do is definitely greater than the number that publish, but as a fraction, its probably a very small number. It would be interesting to see how many of the top-ten sites in various categories have PDF content. Here's a link that might be helpful: toptenlinks.com My non-scientific scan of it didn't produce any PDF content... Milan