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

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (71881)	8/1/2002 12:15:38 AM
From: technologiste	Respond to of 74651

It's important to distinguish government-funded research, like ARPANET, from government-mandated standards like OSI. You do call attention to a certain irony: although the U.S. government funded ARPANET and indirectly its Internet standards, the U.S. government mandated OSI-compliant systems for its agencies and the U.S. military. ARPANET's success did not derive from its government funding. ARPANET was actually a network designed to reconcile competing standards: to allow all sorts of otherwise incompatible computers to exchange information with each other, and practically by accident, the people at those computers to exchange messages with each other through something called "electronic mail". The contrasting fates of the Internet and OSI highlight an instructive point: standards that derive from a need to solve a pressing problem, whose design responds to customer needs, inevitably supplant standards designed for really no other reason than to simply be the standard. Standards like OSI, formulated in an almost complete isolation from the market often accommodate every request no matter its usefulness or the added cost in implementation. It is not surprising therefore that these kinds of standards eventually either sink under the weight of their own complexity, or are met with indifference or rejection in the commercial marketplace. So how does this discussion bear upon Microsoft? Quite simply Microsoft designs its products to serve markets. Monopolies are supposedly immune from market forces, but few companies more methodically research and accommodate customer requests. Maybe overly so. But such an intense focus on the demands of the market does suggest that the common wisdom could be backwards: Microsoft's products are not popular because it has a monopoly, Microsoft has a monopoly because its products are popular. Products in a marketplace that don't respond to customer demands, whose design reflects not the needs of a broad customer base but reflects only the whims and preconceived notions of a self-selected few — such products may not be the products to back as the winners in this race.