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Technology Stocks : PC Sector Round Table -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jonathan Bird who wrote (78)	3/20/1998 9:43:00 AM
From: Pierre-X	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2025

Re: Network Externalities Actually, I hate the term. It's the kind of jargon ivory tower economists like to cook up so they can sound smart amongst themselves. You said: Now the worth of the first person OS is less because it is less scarce. The network externalities are not physical in the OS world, but they are there nevertheless. The value of the OS to the user is not an intrinsic value -- the value derives from the application set that OS makes available to the user. Software developers, desiring to maximize their reward-to-effort ratio, obviously want to develop for the largest installed base. The value of the OS to the first customer goes up with every OS purchase by succeeding customers, since the installed base grows, and attracts more and more developers to create applications for it. God bless, PX