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

To: t2 who wrote (17499)	3/9/1999 12:20:00 PM
From: Hal Rubel	Respond to of 74651

Microsoft Rumor -Annual User Fees for MS Products a Possibility I have seen rumors that Microsoft has been planning to go from a one-time-fee to an annuity payment program for Windows and Office. Computer use will be monitored and users will be billed annually. This will eliminate the revenue feast and famine associated with new product releases and relieve MS of the need for constant innovation in fields it already dominates in order to maintain revenues (a good thing for shareholders). The new system will be "voluntary". If you don't like the annuity system, computer users are free to buy some other product. The dark side is that the OS will require enhanced snooping and reporting (via IE) on users to become enforceable. Some annuity enforcement features are already built in to current products, some are still under development or are in beta. I imagine billing will be direct to Microsoft, rather than through the retail market. If all this is so, Microsoft shares are much more valuable than currently priced. Hal PS: MS Office Privacy Issue on Macintosh and a simple solution. (Mac only, ignore if you use Windows.) From MacInTouch: "Privacy and security topics dominated email from MacInTouch readers yesterday, starting with a major Microsoft privacy issue: Microsoft Office 97/98 documents contain unique, invisible identifiers that can be traced back to an individual computer user, and Microsoft reportedly has collected this information in its internal databases, without customer knowledge, via software registration mechanisms. Subsequent observations from readers include: In checking the identifier, a number of readers discovered fragments of completely unrelated, private data taken from other files and hidden within Word 98 files. We covered this MS Office Security Issue last year and linked to a patch Microsoft subsequently released to close the security hole. (The problem affects both Macs and Window systems, as well as older versions of Microsoft applications and some non-Microsoft applications that also use Microsoft's OLE storage system.) A Microsoft GUID specification describes the identifier in detail, and a number of readers confirmed that the ID includes the MAC (Ethernet) hardware address, which can be displayed with Apple System Profiler and various other utilities. Steve Peterson writes, "It is interesting to note that I saved a file in Word 6.0/95 format and this PID_GUID info was not there. Maybe this means that this is a recent thing. Also, I discovered that the PID_GUID data is in Excel documents that I create." Another reader writes: "Recently, our company upgraded our Xerox high speed print production hardware (DocuTech, etc.) and were discussing advanced options with some Xerox representatives. One of the things that one rep was bragging about was that they had worked with Microsoft (and some other companies) to develop a way to encode 'anonymous' printed surveys with hidden ID numbers that identified the survey recipient's ID that was linked to a detailed profile in Microsoft's (or another company's) database. In effect, the process sounded much like the digital copyright protection measures available for image files, but with far more sinister implications." Chet Zhang notes a workaround that may help with both the disk space and privacy problems in Office, since the same document takes much more disk space in Word 98 than in Word 5. (The workaround imposes some limitations on the document's content, however.) 1. Open MS Word 98 with a new document. 2. Select "Preference..." under the "Tools" menu. 3. Bring froward the "Compatibility" Tab. 4. Under "Recommended options for:" select "Word for the Macintosh 5.x" 5. Click the "Default..." button above OK. and confirm that you want to change the default compatibility option. 6. Bring forward the "Save" Tab. 7. Next to "Save Word files as:", select "Word 5.1 for the Macintosh" 8. Press OK. From now on, all your MS Word files will be saved in Word 5.1 format which takes up drastically less space and does not include that extraneous, private information regarding your computer." HR