(I must be crazy jumping in on this thread)
Remember, it isn't consumers suing Microsoft. It is those companies that got
in their way and became roadkill.
Simply, Microsoft has done good things for the consumer while at the same
time royally screwing their competition. The analogy to IBM in the 70's and
80's is good. A mainframe standard was good for mainframe users. But it put
the BUNCH effectively out of the mainframe business.
Microsoft has a virtual monopoly. But look what they are doing with it. They
are including more and more functionality in the base product. Disk
compression, browser, hooks to MSN...(ok, 2 out of 3)... Good for the
consumer. But by including everything, they reduce the value of their
competition's products to nothing. No revenue, no competition.
The one exception I can think of is what appears to me to be planned
obsolescence through product bloat. If you are someone who has to have the
latest and greatest, you end up paying the Wintel duopoloy again and again
for the same thing. Need the latest MS Office? You will probably want Win98.
Oh, and by the way, you'll also need to upgrade that Pentium-90 to a
Pentium-500.
I use their products and I can live with Win95/Office 98/VC++ 4, so I think
M$ is ok. But I am also a long time shareholder so I may be biased. $-)
Bill
------------------------------------------------------------------------
@Backup- Protect and Access your data any time, any where on the net.
Try @Backup FREE and recieve 300 points from mypoints.com Install now:
http://click.egroups.com/1/2345/4/_/444287/_/957967744/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Community email addresses:
Post message: unrev-II@onelist.com
Subscribe: unrev-II-subscribe@onelist.com
Unsubscribe: unrev-II-unsubscribe@onelist.com
List owner: unrev-II-owner@onelist.com
Shortcut URL to this page:
http://www.onelist.com/community/unrev-II
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 10 2000 - 07:16:52 PDT