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

To: nommedeguerre who wrote (7215)	5/15/1998 3:56:00 AM
From: Dwight E. Karlsen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

So like I'm saying, your beef is with the OEM's not with MSFT. MSFT has never stopped the large OEM's from throwing in a CD with Netscape. Your complaint is minor IMO. Perhaps MSFT has been aggressive in promoting their products. Shareholders expect no less. And in fact, I would bet that in the next few days, MSFT will announce that OEMs can preinstall whatever they want to. But here's the other thing that everyone seems to forget about. When MSFT was going about to the OEMs in preparation for Win95's release, MSFT offered the OEMs a choice ($ figures are guesses, I don't remember the exact #s, but they were published in a John Dvorak PC Magazine column in the Summer of 1995 titled "Gunboat marketing" -GG-: Choice A: Pay MSFT $55 for every copy of Win95 you install on a system. Choice B: Pay MSFT $45 for every PC sold, whether or not it has Win95 installed on it. The OEM's had a choice. They went with choice B. Therefore, if you want a different OS, the OEM's make you pay extra for it, because the OEM has already paid MSFT to put Win95 on every system, and got a cheaper price because of it. In the cut-throat world of PC mfring, lower costs = lower prices. The customers are the ones who are benefiting from lower prices. Your problem is that you want something that the major OEM's aren't offering. That's not their problem, it's your problem. I provided a solution --> a PC source that doesn't have those contractual obligations with MSFT. You can't have everything you want all the time. But in a free market, you can come very close, and you can usually get the product you want -- just maybe not from who you wanted it from.