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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Lawrence who wrote (7125)	10/21/1997 12:39:00 AM
From: drmorgan	Respond to of 22053

However, they have a near monopoly on the OS side, which is okay with me, if they maintained a level field for the applications developers. David, good point. There's talk about IE being a feature, an enhancement to the OS. Well I see that as one very expensive feature! It cost millions to develop these advanced browsers as does developing Office suites. Why not throw Office 97 on as an enhancement? Where does it all stop? If nobody ever questioned MS they are large enough and have the financial resources to destroy any company that tries to compete with them. What if they offered Word for free as part of the OS? Would anyone buy Word Perfect? Remember all the crap with Quicken? Why not bundle MS Money with Win95? Microsoft scares me, I do not want to see the software world dominated by one company, ever! They already own the OS but as you say maintain a level playing field for applications development. I believe that is imperative at all cost. Derek

To: David Lawrence who wrote (7125)	10/21/1997 1:20:00 AM
From: Wigglesworth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22053

<<But, no, they [Microsoft] use hidden and undocumented code to help out their in-house apps, and give them access to pre-release OS information, which is wrong. >> First charge: Absolutely, not true, David. And I am serious. App developers at Microsoft use the same documentation that outside developers use. No special edition of APIs. And they (or any developer for that matter) would be very stupid to use undocumented code. Second charge: pre-release OS info is available to outside beta testers also. Because of distribution logistics, Microsofties have more frequent updates (and encounter problems sooner, and waste time even more) and external testers need to wait for less frequent cd releases. But Microsoft developers don't have exclusive access to pre-release OS.