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

To: JP Sullivan who wrote (11662)	3/27/2006 9:42:31 AM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 19790

Bill Gates talks a lot about "Software research". Personally, I think that most of the stuff he talks about, has nothing to do with research. It seems to me, that Microsoft experiments a lot in order to know a lot, but the main products are basically evolution based on what is needed to maintain the market position. The biggest innovation in the last 5 years in Microsoft products must be .net. It's basically Borland Delphi (= Anders Hejlsberg) converted to run on a Java-like engine with multiple syntax engines. It is a no-brainer from a technical point of view, it just requires a lot of manhours to implement. I still haven't seen anything in .net, that I haven't seen before elsewhere from other companies or people, and that is really useful. I don't know how much money Microsoft actually spends on Windows development, but I think they'll choke on the fact, that the accumulated value of the development that goes into Linux each year, is much larger, and Linux is a much cleaner product because it is able to break backwards compatibility all the time. Apple capitalizes on this by using the GNU components, KHTML and other components from Linux, which has made them able to produce one of the best OS's around, even though they are a smaller company than Microsoft. If the current fuzz has as a result, that components of future Windows versions will be replaced with Linux components, I wouldn't be surprised. I don't see this as unrealistic, and I don't think it would change the market position of Windows significantly, if done the right way.