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

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (12022)	11/3/1998 4:59:00 PM
From: Charles Tutt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

IBM's bundling of the Lotus Office Suite with their new sub-$1k machines might also make a difference. JMHO.

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (12022)	11/4/1998 1:23:00 AM
From: Andy Thomas	Respond to of 74651

Hi Cheryl, I think the question here is commercial versus open software. MSFT thinks of their business model as "natural" - protected as it is by antiquated copyright laws. There are some of us here - myself included - who think that the OSS model is actually the "more natural" model, and that MSFT's business model is an anomaly in the historical sense. In other words, MSFT will go down at some point. It's only a matter of when people wake up to the snake oil MSFT's been buying. The money in computers is naturally in technical support and customization of open source. That people at MSFT make 10s of millions of dollars in a cloistered environment which produces buggy, bloated, and non-intuitve software isn't healthy for anyone. One important point in the commentary embedded in the halloween document... MSFT is the symptom of the problem, not necessarily the source. The struggle is nonetheless between quality-driven open source or marketing-driven commercial code. IMO FWIW Andy