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

To: rudedog who wrote (10995)	9/25/1998 10:26:00 AM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

Dream on Folks do not buy a computer to run an operating system. They buy it to run applications. When Linux runs AOL, Quicken, Barbie's Dreamhouse, and the thousands of other programs that consumers care about then we can speculate about Windows' vulnerabilities. The fact is that software has become a larger percentage of the total system budget for decades. This is not a new phenomenon. It began when IBM realized in the late 1970s that they could charge for software rather than giving it away with their mainframes as they had previously done. As hardware prices plummet consumers use a portion of that savings to buy more software. So they take the hundreds they would previously have spent on the basic box and buy a copy of Microsoft Home Essentials, or Encarta, or a photo editor. The total system price is lower but software garners a greater percentage of that total. That's why software is such a great business. We started with software being a giveaway to induce hardware sales. We'll shortly approach the opposite situation.