>>Bill Gates may play the business game like hard ball, but if everyone >>stole his software, he wouldn't have these millions to give away. If you >>buy his software, you'll also feel warm and fuzzy because you are helping >>promote good causes :-)
There is some question as to if MS would have the monopoly they have now if their software wasn't widely pirated. Remember, every company that bought one copy and installed it on 50 computers commited the offense. Had every company that widely adopted MS (and thus gave MS the marketshare they have now), had paid for every last copy that they installed, there is question if they would have gone with cheaper, just as good (and in many cases better) software, and thus MS would never have gained the monopoly they have. For the most part, MS only made superficial attempts to enforce licensing of their software (outside the OEM OS market that is) until the late 90's when they offically went on an anti-piracy kick (and also conviently, AFTER they had won the war and had their 90% market share). At one point, MS even had Win95 available for download from their web site. It wasn't an offical download, but it wasn't a very well hidden download either, and was somewhat obvious that it was put there deliberatly for anyone that happen to find it, it had an offical web page, it wasn't just some random link that happen to lead to a downloadable copy... BTW: this was while Win95 was the current shipping OS. And don't forget, software piracy is a mainstay of much of the home market, and has been going on since long before MS was much of a player. If you look at the companies that go thru a ton of effort to keep from being pirated, you will notice that they are not large players in the home market. No home market means you can't have 90%+ market share. So don't discount the role piracy had in making MS the company and size that it is. >My reason for using MS Office (after buying it) is that if there's not a >large enough market for Mac versions of their products they may no longer >produce them. If that happens, Mac sales would plunge even lower than >they are now, and the future of Apple would then be in jeopardy. This is fairly doubtful. First off their Mac BU is making money, and from what I understand, making more money than any other department (vs costs that is, ie: looking at what kind of a profit it is making, not looking at gross $$ brought in). 2nd: There is really no evidence that Mac sales are at all connected to the existance of MS Office. There never HAS been any proof that the two were connected. In fact, the biggest selling times of the Mac, MS Office wasn't really an issue. And currently, Mac sales are growing, while MS Office sales are shrinking. The only link the loss of MS Office would do to the Mac, is make businesses think twice about making Macs a main stream computer in their office. But businesses already think twice about that. For the most part, the Mac is NOT a main stream business computer, it is religated in the business world to specific tasks/departments. MS would like nothing more than for everyone to believe that the existance of the Mac is directly tied to the existance of MS Office for the Mac... and that is just simply not true. The MS Free Mac is a growing trend, and with good viable, CHEAP alternatives to MS Office in OS X, that trend may also continue. ThinkFree Office reads and writes MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files (in fact uses those formats as the default) and retails for $50. And I think everyone on this list will agree that Entourage has serious contenders out there, also cheaper and better. And don't forget all the Mac sales going to Unix converts... people that have no preexisting loyalties to MS Office (but do have loyalties to similar non MS products available for *nix, and are either already available for OS X, or are rapidly becoming available) MS Office has already become an irrelivant factor to the Mac's well being, and their irrelivance is growing every month as Office X lays stagnant and over priced and other cheaper, better contenders appear. -chris <http://www.mythtech.net> ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
