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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dragonfly who wrote (1191)	6/3/1998 2:48:00 PM
From: Robert Winchell	Respond to of 1600

Writing commercial application software for mainstream business and operating at a break-even or profit? I'd say less than 30. OK, if you limit it to "commercial application software for mainstream business" then you may be right. But that is certainly a tiny fraction of what's out there. How manyu companies making developer tools and components? How many games companies? How many utility software and shareware? The problem is not that MS makes the only products that suck, but that they manage to kill the market for other companies so there's no incentive to compete on quality. I don't expect you to ever be able to see this. I do see this, in the same way that all large companies stifle the growth of smaller companies. Once any company has a foothold in a market, there is less incentive to compete with it. Witness Intuit and Quicken. Why aren't there any other good home finance/banking applications? Because nobody wants to compete with Intuit! Other than MS of course. Why aren't there small database companies springing up all over? Because they can't compete with Oracle. I geuss it is a little different since they are 800-pound gorillas and MS is a 1200-pound gorilla - with a gun.