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

To: Mike Milde who wrote (9891)	7/31/1998 11:04:00 PM
From: Phil Melemed	Respond to of 74651

You said: If it's very easy to install any application just by asking for it, without the user having to tinker with things, then there will be a demand for just the OS, not all the other stuff at the same time. I think that you are mixing ease of use and packaging choices in ways that do not make sense to me. You talk about "Just the OS". I do not believe there is universal agreement on which part is the OS and which part is not. There may be a demand for just the part of the OS that you personally want at a particular time. That set of pieces may be different for your neighbor. So as long as we are selling software on physical media, it may make sense to continue bundling lots of components together on that single source. There is nothing stopping Microsoft or any other vendor from putting in an installation interface that lets the user install as many or as few of those components as that user wants. We do that today, and will continue to do that. For the sake of minimizing the number of discrete boxes available in a retail setting, I expect vendors will still want to include as many components in the box as possible for the same price and let the user decide which ones to load. I think that you believe including so many pieces in the box costs you more. Perhaps you are talking about money, perhaps you are talking about disk space. If it is a money issue, what price would you want Microsoft to charge for Windows so you would not mind having a copy of additional bits on your machine or an extra CD? If it is a disk space issue, wouldn't a simpler installer interface allowing selection as described above, or an install-on-demand feature that is certainly in Microsoft's future, satisfy your needs? Of course, some people will still want to have everything all at once, physically available, and perhaps preinstalled. People who know that they will not always be connected to a network or have a CD drive around or have the CD they need readily available. Or people who want to load everything once and have everything available immediately from that point on, rather than waiting for their features to download every time they want to do something new. A dynamic install process with availability of all the pieces when the user wants without lots of fiddling is exactly what Microsoft wants. It is just not what we have today.