On Sun, 18 Jul 1999, Indranil Das Gupta wrote:
> Street seems to stronger than ever in its favour. MSFT is not a sinking
> ship by any extent of imagination, at least not yet, but with its opponents
> showng signs of growing stronger everyday, it still manages to find more
> people to support it.
What Wall St. thinks needs to be ignored by the consumer base as their
ideas are not in out best interest. MSFT is not a sinking-ship in their
mind, it is the flagship of a political movement. Bill Gates is himself
the 'American Dream', and the so-called 'opponents' need to be looked at
more closely before we can call them allies for the
FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements. EG: Apple has released much
open-source products, but differ from Microsoft only in success, not
philosophy. Corel is putting manpower into existing OSS/FS projects, but
not even contemplating upgrading the licences on any of their existing
products. Full-success of OSS/FS projects ultimately mean the failure of
Apple/Corel and they are going to know that.
The fact that Wall Street is still supporting Microsoft is not the least
surprising. Wall Street is not going to turn against one of their own.
Wall Street is simply yet another government subsidized gambling
establishment - a place where it is expected to get 'something for
nothing'. What Microsoft (and I would say most propriatary
licence-sellers) is doing is considered good business by their standards:
put the least value into a product and try to extract the greatest amount
of money out of your customers. What is and is not good for the customer
is irrelevant unless the customer perceives an alternative and is able to
shop elsewhere. MSFT customers are by and large captive audiences that
are not able to be swayed by alternative product superiority, but only by
marketing might which Microsoft has against it's alternatives.
---
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://russell.flora.org/work/>
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