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

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (11636)	3/25/2006 12:58:33 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19790

this is an interesting blog post. One thing I hate about blogs is the writers sometimes talk in a kind of riddle as if they are alluding to something, and we all have to guess what it is. I guess they see this as clever. Plus this guy seems amazingly self important and is peeved about being left off an invite to have lunch with gates. But anyway here is the gist of it. Here's what he seems to be saying- - the Jan vista date might still slip - Ozzie is behind software as a service much more than Allchin - The "60% needs rewriting" is true, but it really means Office live which is technically a new product is being injected into windows - Office live as a free office might compete effectively against Google. I'm going to have a lot of respect for Ozzie if he can pull this off. When I go on and on about Office being dead, and the Allchin Tax–which is about how Allchin protected Windows at all cost by killing IE functionality that undermined Office revenue–and then Allchin retires while still ducking a real conversation with someone about its implications for the ascention of some of those technologies (AJAX, Live, advertising-based free, etc.) that he taxed, well….. Same thing here: When Mike reports Bill was bored, or that Bill doesn't get the preoccupation with thin Office plays like Gmail, it's not me who loses the opportunity to resonate with the audience, it's Bill. The users are in charge, not Microsoft. Not Google. Not the carriers, although Kevin Martin may think so. We are, and we'll vote with our packets. It's a subscription model, not a prescription model. Scoble understands this, but in recent weeks he's been making the mistake of cutting off the access of Bill and Jim and Steve to our gestures of intent. The customers/users/us will flow in the direction of a relationship, because as the expression goes, who wants to pay retail? Now, Robert, I know you a long time, and you may not think I'm doing you much of a favor here by washing this linen in the clear, but you reap what you sew when you ignore your instincts. Stop calling for the head of a reporter or an editor or both about the 60% code story. Are you so sure that's untrue? Or put it another way–are you so sure anyone except maybe Bill really knows how much code has to be rewritten, or thrown away, to meet a January deadline which most likely will also slip? If anything has become clearer over the last couple of days it is that Ray Ozzie has moved more precipitously than even I thought (Office dead, office dead, office dead) to rework Redmond around services. Here's my bet on the 60%–it's the real Office Live code, the stuff that GOffice is stripmining, injected into Vista. It's the real Windows bundle–Office hook line and sinker–free with the OS. Hell, they could even jack up the price 50% and no one would really complain. But Kevin Johnson and CAO Yusuf Mehdi will most likely subsidize it with ad revenue. How do you beat Netscape? Free the browser. How do you beat Google? Free Office. blogs.zdnet.com

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (11636)	3/25/2006 1:38:42 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19790

True, but this happened recently post-2000. Because engineering is now a sweatshop due to globalization and it was not in the 90s. That's a factor. I think other factors, probably many others, were at least as important as offshoring, which has been going on for a long time. My favorite factor is the all-encompassing scope of stock-market consciousness in US culture toward the end of the bubble. 1929 on steroids. EVERYBODY was like John D. Rockefeller's proverbial shoeshine boy (when he gives you a stock tip, you know it's time to get out of the market). Motley Fool, instant e-trades, day-trading as a profession, CNBC, housewives investment clubs, celebrity CEO's, losers who were dozing in their offices when somebody handed them an envelope full of options that turned them into retired millionaires 3 months later, debates about naked puts in biker bars, Barbara Stresand makes $900,000 in six months on tech stocks, "Fast Company", etc. etc. etc. There were more investment geniuses than people. Some of them must have been dogs or corpses. I submit the birth and incongruous survival of SI as a trivially minor piece of evidence. I think it changed for the long term (maybe quasi-permanently) the way Americans above the poverty class think; and the better off you are, the more likely you think that way. This certainly includes bright college students. I don't think they see life the same way any more. Could be wrong though. --QS

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (11636)	3/25/2006 3:43:58 PM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19790

The greatest value belongs to products that everybody wants but not everybody can produce. It is quite easy to create scientists today, if you just measure it as the amount of people who have a diploma. The company startup, that I'm in right now, is in the process of adding more programmers. We will most likely add these from eastern europe, and we will redesign parts of our product, so that noncritical components go abroad and critical components stay here. What does this mean for employment? Well, we're almost in labor shortage in this country, so not adding more employees doesn't matter a lot. The employees locally will be very much in response of design, resource planning, information logistics etc., and they will be responsible of knowing how to write code. In other words, local employees get a raise and have more advanced tasks. What USA needs, is just enough new business to replace what went offshore. The level of success when offshoring jobs depends a lot on how you do it.