Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (19794)	5/28/1998 1:08:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

Right, Reggie. You're the authority on everything, most particularly cheesy debate techniques. The ever elusive context of the Mind of Reg(TM) is a old conundrum. Think Microsoft's lawyers will have you testify to explain away all that email? There's one little point in this post that is, er, contradicted by history. VBA is freely licensed to third parties who are actually encouraged to integrate it into thier apps, thereby eliinating the need to recode much of MSFT's end users proprietary technology. There was a story a year ago or so, where Corel heard about this "freely licensed" best thing since sliced bread VBA technology, and called Redmond about getting this "free license" that everybody else was getting. To them, the cost was a cool $50million. Another one of those newfangled Microsoftese definitions of "free", I guess. Oh, and I see that besides what Beavis noted there was plenty of other stuff where you couldn't be bothered to "read what you have typoed carefully", or even look at the red words in the preview. Eliinating? Cheers, Dan.

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (19794)	5/28/1998 3:43:00 PM
From: Thure Meyer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

"Illustrates exactly how a company could go about minimizing risk and switching costs" "VBA is freely licensed to third parties who are actually encouraged to integrate it into thier apps, thereby eliinating the need to recode much of MSFT's end users proprietary technology. Excel and Word files are read and written accurately by many third party applcations. Specialty add-in libraries are available for several products." Reginald, Lets look at the above statement and try to understand what your are trying to say. First of all I can't tell from the above whose switching costs you are referring to. But lets look at an example anyway. - Suppose VBA is used by other software vendors in building their applications. E.g., if I were to build a new spreadsheet application with some great new function (call it Vector-Sheet), I should somehow integrate VBA so that my new application is compatible with Excel - Lets say I have some customers who actually buy Vector-Sheet. Now, since I can't expect everyone in the world to buy my product immediately, there is some time N during which I have to convert data between Excel and Vector-Sheet. During that time I promise my customers that Vector-Sheet and Excel will be compatible. Having bought VBA and integrated it I am now dependent on Microsoft to keep me upgraded. Or put another way, during N I am constantly facing the risk that Microsoft will not support me. Given Microsofts past history, what would they do if I gained any market share at the expense of Excel? How then, am I minimizing my risk? My potential Vector-Sheet customers are also at risk for the same reasons and they face additional integration costs. So why should anyone incur incur this risk or any switching costs even though Vector-Sheet is technically superior? They won't! Why is that? Because a superior spread-sheet is not business critical for most companies and certainly not for or the home user. In order for new technology to be adopted it has to be different in a fundamental way. Like a browser....which the geniuses at Microsoft couldn't figure out. --- On a different note: your simplistic statements about how everything is easy to do, runs in the same vein of B. Gates "Windows can be replaced in a day" (Gates can't even upgrade to Win98 in a day). If Microsoft really wanted to let applications be compatible with their Office Suite then let them put the file formats and their semantic interpretation into the public domain. I am getting the feeling that you are being more catholic than the Pope here. You seem to have this compulsion to prove that Microsoft is acting ethically and has achieved their market position through benevolent means. That's all irrelevant to their current monopoly position as well as their actions toward Netscape and probably other software vendors. The discussion about switching costs, network externalities, path dependence, etc. is an attempt to understand the mechanisms of monopoly not a way to mask it. Thure

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (19794)	6/2/1998 10:04:00 PM
From: Keith Hankin	Respond to of 24154

The sentence directly below your choice selection from my post illustrates exactly how a company could go about minimizing risk and switching costs, but somehow you chose to ignore that because it invalidated your point. The key word here is minimizing risk and switching costs. However, the statement that Thure picked out of that same article indicates that the switching costs and risks are still extremely high, even when minimized as much as possible.