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Technology Stocks : Microsoft Corp. - Moderated (MSFT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (10400)	12/8/2005 1:09:11 PM
From: sandeep	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19790

MP3/itunes? - Microsoft is really not a competitor here. You know they have WMA, not MP3 - right? In any case, they don't make the hardware or the service. They are not in this business - they are likely to lose and did - in fact, I don't count them in this biz at all. Msft Passport/Paypal - Passport never had a payment model. This is not the same business. MSN search vs Google - yes. But jury is still out. MSN messenger vs AOL - worldwide numbers show otherwise - ditto with Skype. IE vs Firefox - last numbers had IE winning again. 85% market share is losing. Amazing! Vista - I agree.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (10400)	12/9/2005 5:51:39 AM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 19790

That is a weird list... if you list all the technologies in the world, Microsoft has lost most of them because they weren't intending to win them. Like making digital cameras. If I would put up a list of losing Microsoft technologies, it would be something like: - Win32-based MSN. Internet wins. - Windows media formats. MP3/JPG/GIF/PNG/MPG wins. - Search. Google wins. I agree on that one. - RTF e-mails. HTML e-mails won. - IP telephony. SIP/RTP wins. Skype gets a larger piece of the cake than Microsoft, but also lost this one. I included this one because Microsoft claim to have ambitions in this area. - Cluster supercomputers. Linux wins. - Mobile phones. Nokia, SonyEricsson etc. win for now. - GIS. Google, Garmin/TomTom etc. are dictating that market. - Internet DNS. Linux wins. (the list could be a lot longer) Then there are a number of technologies that Microsoft has kept out of that they maybe should be participating in, like online calendar sharing (iCal is dominating), and there are technologies where they theoretically could have had a larger market share (hotmail, browsers etc.). I wouldn't count these as losers though. Most of the technologies, where Microsoft really lost, were lost because there was an alternative open standard (as defined by the majority of people, not as defined by Microsoft) or because Microsoft could not get an advantage from its ownership of the Microsoft platform. I strongly disagree that MSFT instance messenger lost and that IE is losing. Microsoft passport was killed by the Microsoft CFO (hailstorm) and Apple does not own MP3. Anyway, the squeezebox from slimdevices might be the next big thing around, so watch out, Apple. I know more people owning squeezeboxes than iPods now. Even the PDA market is now losing to GPS navigation devices. Instead of buying a PDA, people are buying a dedicated GPS navigator, not based on an operating system that is visible to the end-user. The list of GPS navigator devices in my local computer store is a lot longer than the list of PDAs. I'm sure that GPS navigators and Squeezeboxes will be popular christmas gifts this year. Microsoft already lost the edge. They own Windows and Office, and everything that Microsoft does has to relate to these two products. Microsofts stock value must be based on the value of these two products, and not how they perform with search technology.