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To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (14098)	11/13/1997 7:21:00 PM
From: Dermot Burke	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

Regimond-how can you say there is competition now?Only Sun is left exclusively selling a competing operating system.Apple and SGI have opted to become Microsoft distributors.IBM already is.Cut the nonsense of spouting off about applications. I was at the Nader Conference in DC today.This was an information forum.It was definitely not a MSFT bashing party--McNeely talked about" freedom of choice,as opposed to freedom from choice"; said he had no Bill envy-"a 3 car garage is ok for him,since only 2 people drive in his family".Scott also said the event" was a worthy discussion to have",that the Web is going to Win,the question is "How long will it take?"Other Scottisms included referring to the MSFT imposed "iron curtain of no choice" and one other Soviet analogy, MSFT's planned economy approach as the antithesis of a good ol market economy.Bill should have attended--He's guilty by ommission.The only Microsoft emloyee I saw there was Bruce Francis.One could ask where the heck was Barksdale and Andreessen.Java Man is one hell of a CEO.The man earns his money and fronts his company like Billy boy never will.

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (14098)	11/14/1997 11:50:00 PM
From: Keith Hankin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

First of all, the economics on Unix systems is very different. It would cost a lot more to provide these applications under UNIX than under MSFT OSes. Moreover, the Unix versions of these products is often not as good as the MSFT versions, and is often much more out-of-date. The products are developed for MSFT, then later, it might be ported to UNIX or some other OS. Also, don't tell me that you have nearly as much choice of applications on any other OS as you do with MSFT. That is the draw of MSFT - the availability of applications. Developers develop first for MSFT because this is where most of the sales can be made. Most develop only for MSFT, due to the uncertainty of whether they can make any profit on other platforms. Morever, with the decline Apple's marketshare, you can be sure that there will be fewer applications ported to it. People buy MSFT OSes because this is the platform with the most application choices are. Thus, a vicious self-sustaining circle of dominancy of MSFT is maintained. Another issue I did not address is support costs. Companies are trying to standardize on one platform to cut down on IT costs and training. Only MSFT has a platform that will provide all the applications that an organization needs. Other solutions would require a mixed-platform environment, which is much more expensive to maintain. So, given the economics, application-availability, and safety of choosing MSFT, almost no-one would choose anything else. Yes, they do have a choice, but by making other choices, one has to sacrifice a lot. Thus, MSFT has lots of leeway to screw people before they will make any other choice. Indeed MSFT dominates every market except in special cases, such as high-end scalable applications (likely to change as NT becomes more scalable), high-end graphics (also changing with more capable PC hardware), and desktop publishing (also changing as a result of Mac's decline as the premiere vendor), and religious end-users (usually of the Apple kind). Also note that most of the advantages that MSFT has over others is not a result of MSFT's own doing (e.g. creating great products), but more having to do with their monopoly status, which they have enjoyed for most of the time they have been in business. Sure, they could have lost this monopoly without sound executive decisions, but monopolies are pretty hard to lose. You have to screw up big-time. Look at how many failures occurred within MSFT, but they still succeeded.