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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: clochard who wrote (17271)	6/19/2002 10:32:16 PM
From: Hardly B. Solipsist	Respond to of 19080

I do work with MSFT products, but only as a software developer for companies that have no business relationships with MSFT. I use their products because I either have no choice or because it's worse to not use them. But the products are much worse than they should be. MSFT has some of the best software engineers in the world working on products that never rise above mediocre, and products that have been around for a long time rarely seem to stabilize and improve. Office and PowerPoint are amazingly easy to crash for products that are widely used and have been around so long. The incentives within the company just aren't there for them to fix bugs in a lot of things (I was complaining to a friend that works there about bugs in VC++ and he just shrugged his shoulders and told me why they would probably never get fixed...) And I agree with you that MSFT's products are probably good enough (most of the time) that they are safe choices for companies that don't need "the best stuff". And down the road these companies will bitterly regret getting stuck with them. It is not at all clear to me that MSFT is going to have much success in the enterprise applications market, though, at least with larger companies. My impression is that big companies usually have long enough memories that they that can remember what doing business with Mr. Softy means (because they remember what it meant to do business with Mr. IBM).