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

To: t2 who wrote (17834)	3/12/1999 7:23:00 PM
From: JP Sullivan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Rusty, "MS Porting Office to Linux". It is crazy!! I can't see that yet---maybe when Windows 2000 is out or maybe not. Tech, Best to keep an open mind. It's not unusual for a company to cannibalize it's own products (in this case Windows) to win share in a developing market. (Hey, nothing is sacred.) And Linux is certainly a developing market. Depending on how you want to look at it, Linux can be a huge threat or a great opportunity for MS. Consider the Internet: MS was late to the party, some would say very late. Then a light bulb went on inside BG's head, and he decided to "embrace and extend" the Internet. Now MS is into everything Internet. We can safely say that MS has a significant presence in and on the Internet. Since Linux is open source, even MS can participate, right? So what's to keep MS from cooking up it's version of Linux and fragmenting the market enough to own a nice piece of it? MS certainly has the bucks to win over masses of Linux developers -- those who like $$ more than they hate MS -- to work on this version, or mutation if you prefer. Linux is "free", so the only way to make money from it is to package it in convenient boxes and throw in some documentation. This is what RedHat, Caldera, et al are doing. Now, who's the KING of software hype and packaging, bloatware and feature glut? There's nothing to stop MS from participating in this arena. And I think it should. What's really going to happen with MS and Linux? I don't know, but here's a (pipe) dream for the week: MS succeeds in pulling an IE with Linux. "Windux", anyone? Winston