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Technology Stocks : Intel Strategy for Achieving Wealth and Off Topic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sonny McWilliams who wrote (19685)	6/1/1998 3:17:00 AM
From: David M Gambs	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27012

Sonny, I believe a part - if not most - of the different way we view things MSFT is due to back ground. I am a techie from the word go. I deal in UNIX and nitty gritty network stuff amongst other things. I take great pride in my work in these areas. I expect others working in similar areas to live up to my expectations. MSFT does not. You, on the other hand, appear to be a non-technical 'end' user. You want things to work in a fairly predictable manner. Most people like this do not really care about who manufactures the software, nor how it is produced nor bundled. You may have a preference for a particular word processor, spreadsheet, or such - primarily because you are accustomed to it and know how it works. I prefer the technically superior solution. I use Netscape Communicator because it is a better product. It also conforms to the set standard better than IE does. Unfortunately, the best - technically - product does not always win. Betamax & DR-DOS are two that come to mind quickly. The same may become true if IE dominates the market vs NC. NC is far superior - from a technical point of view - vs IE. I have had run-ins with MSFT before. They have made claims in their advertising literature which were absolutely false. When a complaint was raised to them, they did nothing to remedy the situation. Quite simply, they played the big bully. MSFT products are also known as 'fat-ware'. This is because there is extra code that is not needed by the program. This comes from 'libraries of functions' that get added wholesale. As an exercise, a MSFT application was decompiled and stripped of extraneous code then recompiled. The size shrank some 53%. The recompiled application also ran about 27% faster. (As a note - the re-written software was destroyed after testing.) Now, if you reduced the size of MSFT applications by an average 40% you would not need hard drives as large as are needed today. If the programs executed an average 20% faster, you would not need CPUs that run as fast either. Much of the hardware required today is due in large part by poorly written programs. This has cost the consumer many dollars. I would hate to try and guess what extra the average consumer has paid. As to Gateway 'breaking out of the norm', this only works if you also purchase their ISP service when you purchase a new system. Therefore, I look at this as a concession to an ISP, not a box maker. So, I have a very different view point on this whole thing. Like I said previously, I am not against MSFT per se. I have owned MSFT although I do not currently own any of their stock. I used profits from MSFT to buy down the cost of LU. As to the OS I am 'eyeing', I have used both at work and have a copy of BSDi UNIX just waiting to be installed. But this is UNIX and in general does not run the applications that you are used to using on your PC. Yes you can get 'add-ons' that will allow you to run PC applications under UNIX. However, on the system on which I will be putting UNIX, it would not be a good idea. The system is much too slow to run the emulation well. (It is a 486 33MHz system.) UNIX is not for the casual user. But, as you state, no one knows what the future holds. Maybe I will decide to write an OS and put it in the public domain and see if a dent can be made in MFST. If the product is good enough, it would make a showing at least. Regards, dmg (Go INTeL® Go to $200 [post all splits: past, present & future])