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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: drmorgan who wrote (319)	11/25/1997 4:35:00 PM
From: Robert Winchell	Respond to of 1600

But over time things can change and public sentiment can change, and eventually what if the people have a choice between Windows and Java or whatever to run on their computers? People already have a choice - Windows, Mac, UNIX/Linux, OS/2, Be, and a few others. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy anything. If you want to buy a computer for home, are you forced to buy Intel/Windows? Of course not. So why do people buy it? Because that's where the software is. The software base for Windows is bigger than anything else. The hardware compatibility for Windows is bigger than anything else. People buy Windows bacause that's what they know how to use, and that's where the best and most software is (more or less). People say "UNIX is better than Windows" or "MacOS is better than Windows". Better at what? Running the 10,000 games available for DOS/Windows? Better at running applications like Quicken, Word and Excel that people actually use? What will be happening in the year 2005? Will everyone still be running Windows? Will people hate MSFT by the millions? The question is, what would possibly make people change from Windows to something else. There are arguably 200 million systems running Windows in the world. What would make people get rid of Windows and all the thousands of dollars of hardware, software and knowledge they already have? I think the percentage of new computers (in all forms) that run Windows will actually decrease slightly over the next 5 years, but the number of total computers running Windows will continue to climb.