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

To: Ed Yander who wrote (10262)	8/24/1998 11:43:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Oh right, the freeware thingy is so much better and pure. Pity those uninformed lawyers and doctors charging fees for their services and then driving home in the BMW with the beautiful blonde. Uh, earth to Ed? You know, people used to pay for Netscape software, till Microsoft set the price of browsers to 0. Paul Maritz's air supply thing. It was a best seller! It was what the customers wanted! On the other hand, Bill himself said giving away software was communist, but that was in an older revisionist history than the current one. Free probably isn't cheap enough to displace Windows, anyway. The nice thing about "open source", though, is that you can actually fix things, or have your staff fix things, or hire somebody to fix things. With Bill's "Windows is open" software (open like war is peace, etc.), well, when a "known issue" shows up, (after a few $200 phone calls of course) you better hope it's something you can work around. If not, you might end up like those sailors on the Yorktown, getting towed into port. At least in peacetime, let's hope they don't have to face the "blue screen of death" during a shooting war. (ref: gcn.com ) Of course, most of the cost of software, Microsoft's or anybody elses, isn't in acquisition, it's keeping it running over the long term. The TCO studies don't show Microsoft products to be a particularly good deal on that front, but they're all wrong, and Bill's got a solution for that anyway, maybe NT5, due sometime in the next millennium I think. They bet the company on it! Cheers, Dan.

To: Ed Yander who wrote (10262)	8/25/1998 12:53:00 AM
From: nommedeguerre	Respond to of 74651

Ed Yander, >>This Linux freeware insanity is contributing to lowering the status of the software engineer in societies class structure. No wonder universities are finding people less interested in taking computer science. Maybe the so-called "software engineers" who are feeling a lower status are ones who only carry the title anyways. Real software engineers will always be in demand; hacks will find something else to do that pays well. Who wants to spend four years in college to administer a web-page or do NT reboots for a living? Its a waste of an education to be an MSCE or Excel Guru. The more freeware the better, it will release resources to be used more effectively somewhere else. Cheers, Norm

To: Ed Yander who wrote (10262)	8/25/1998 8:03:00 AM
From: Mike Milde	Respond to of 74651

<< This Linux freeware insanity is contributing to lowering the status of the software engineer in societies class structure. No wonder universities are finding people less interested in taking computer science. >> Are you saying that Linux is keeping software engineers from making the big bucks? Are you saying that software engineers, while making the big bucks, are not respected in society? Or are you saying that if you spend big bucks for your OS you will win the admiration of your peers? Mike