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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: X-Ray Man who wrote (4114)	11/21/1997 6:33:00 PM
From: Alan Buckley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

MSFT negotiates good deals for themselves alright. Let's suspend disbelief for a moment and take your opinion that this is "illegitimate" and the main reason MSFT is where it is today. Hmmm...this AAPL that decided to can their product just because of the agreements the PC clone-makers signed with MSFT...that's the same AAPL that recently pulled back the Mac cloning licenses after it occurred to them the clone-makers were going to undercut them in price. Wow, isn't that a great decision for Mac customers? Wonder if this closed system policy has something to do with their failure to hold marketshare or clone-maker reluctance to do business with them? Nahhh, must be that "illegitimate" MSFT thing. Hmmm...this DR-DOS, the system of Gary Kildall...the guy who told IBM to go away (to MSFT as it turns out) rather than cutting a lucrative deal like Gates did for MS-DOS. I wonder if royally screwing up what turned out to be negotiations for the premiere spot in a huge new industry had something to do with DR-DOS sinking into obscurity. Nahhhh, must be that "illegitimate" MSFT thing again. You stated a few posts back that "MSFT is a known slacker in quality and innovation". Let's apply a little "intellectual honesty" to that thought. An article a couple posts ago describes the large investment MSFT is making in research, and makes an interesting comparison to the small/none investments of several of their larger competitors. Hmmm, these other companies, they're the innovative ones, huh? Today NewsWire reports MSFT won 13 awards at Comdex for product excellence. The awards were "across product and publication lines". Hmmm, but you say they have "well know quality problems"? Apparently, not when compared to the alternatives. Did it ever occur to you that MSFT is the only OS company that doesn't directly compete with the independent manufacturers that build their hardware? There's no thriving competition in the SparcStation market...or the IBM mainframe market...or the Mac market, yet the PC clone market is fiercely competitive and prices have been falling steadily for 15 years. Is it any surprise that with hundreds of manufacturers shipping their systems that MSFT would want to keep some measure on control to prevent Windows from fragmenting disastrously the way Unix has? No, it is not. So we disagree. IMO MSFT is great for consumers and if their competitors can't keep up, tough. Enjoy your posts, though. You present the opposing viewpoint well.