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

To: Hal Rubel who wrote (7684)	5/19/1998 9:07:00 PM
From: John F. Dowd	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

How come it has taken AAPL so long to get to OS8.1? Why don't we have a personal version of UNIX that has captured the public's imagination? Why did IBM (with all their resources) throw in the towel on OS2 and on and on. If a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his butt. MSFT did the job in getting the support of the consumer and third party developers. They made it cheap for the consumer and profitable for third party developers. Where is the crime in that ? And they did it the new fashioned American way - with a mediocre product. This is all political. By the way if dominance is bad why not go after ORCL they hold about 80% of the DB market. JFD

To: Hal Rubel who wrote (7684)	5/19/1998 11:05:00 PM
From: Dwight E. Karlsen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Especially when that system-house seems to integrate only in-house products to the exclusion of outside developers. Not true of course. MS makes the OS. No company has worked harder IMO than Microsoft, in sharing and encouraging third party development of products to work with and complement the Microsoft OS. Think of the gargantuan job it was to even attempt to implement "plug-n-play". Sure it didn't work perfect every time, because that's a huge challenge. The Apple way was to sell an AppleWriter printer: "Just use our printer!" no problems. If it were not for the generous win/win/win attitude of Microsoft, the personal computer industry would not today be employing 7 million people world-wide. As I see it, the facts and reality speak for themselves.

To: Hal Rubel who wrote (7684)	5/20/1998 11:54:00 AM
From: Gerald Walls	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

However, the idea just does not sit quite right for me when there is only one system house on a platform. Especially when that system-house seems to integrate only in-house products to the exclusion of outside developers. If by "integrate" you mean actually including the source code into the operating system then of course MSFT is going to own what they integrate. However MSFT includes many licensed products to install with Windows. Just as WAVO shareholders, as an example. Someone will complain regardless of what MSFT does. You're complaining that they develop what they integrate and exclude third parties. If they buy a product from a third party then someone else complains that MSFT never develops anything themselves.