On Tue, 3 Feb 2004, Nadav Har'El wrote: > On Tue, Feb 03, 2004, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Better Deals from Microsoft [was Re: > Debian-installer i18n bidi and Hebrew news.]": > > Why should it? If Microsoft lowers its price, it would be good for the > > customers, who can get the software at a sane price. And it would be good > > for us and here's why: > > Your arguments are correct, but you should be aware also of the negative > aspects of Microsoft's "dumping" practices (selling some software for cheap, > to achieve some other goal such as better sales for a second product, or > more importantly destroying competition with less cash reserves and achieving > a monopoly). > > For example, I have seen more than once on web-sites (Israeli web-sites, > especially... :( ), a message saying something like: > > "This site only works on Internet Explorer. Click *HERE* to get the > this browser, for free!" > > In other words, the cheaper Microsoft products become, the more likely they > are to achieve their 100% monopoly (instead of their current 98% monopoly :)) > and destroy any hope of having open standards. >
Hmmm... you are correct. However, you should remember this: Microsoft is a public company. As such it needs to make a profit if it wishes to survive. It has a lot of developers and other workers to support, and it has a tough competition from the open source world that sometimes produces rival products of equal or superior quality. It must make a revenue if it wishes to survive. Now, Microsoft is making revenue from selling mainly to organizations like businesses, governments, universities, or by OEM deals. We can assume that many home users won't buy its software voluntarily, and Microsoft purposely doesn't care about this fact becaue it's good for them. But if Microsoft was obliged to sell software at extremely cheap prices even to organizations, it would soon make much less profits or actually lose money, its share will fall, it will have to fire employees, etc. This may actually completely tank it. I'm not someone who wishes Microsoft to be unsuccessful. I actually think Microsoft as a whole made the world a better place, by creating good standard software behaviour, bringing operating systems for cheap PCs, creating some high quality software (not all of it, but then again, not all open source software out there is high quality either), and generally showing the world what a smart software company ought to do. (well at least until now, that they have Linux and FOSS and don't know what to do with themselves[1]). > And in case somebody missed this obvious fact yet: this is exactly why > piracy helped, rather than hurt, Microsoft. It is this piracy which allowed > Microsoft products to be available for $0, and help it corner the market. > Only after it cornered the market - and after over a decade of continued > piracy of Microsoft software - Microsoft finally decided to do something > against piracy. Maybe they realised that now they no longer have anything > to lose. Well, they forgot about Linux :) > Microsoft does not do BSA rades on people's homes trying to look for ilegitimate copies of Microsoft office, MS Windows, Visual Basic, etc. They know the wide availability of these things only help them sell more software in the long run. I also think the BSA rades on businesses are a mistake, because it makes people become angry at Microsoft, and anti-pathic towards it, and only increases Linux' image as the "Operating System of Everybody". > > Of course, I would prefer if the Government would try to convert as many > > people to OpenOffice or Linux, so they'll be motivated to fill in the > > gaps. If I were the government, I would have demanded Microsoft to either > > reduce their prices globally in Israel, or suffer the consequences. > > I don't want the government to convert anyone to OpenOffice or Linux. > I want the goverment (and every other institution or company) to realize > that some users are using Linux, some are using Macintosh, some are using > BSD, or whatever, and some (a large majority) are using Windows. Allowing > all these people to use the services is more important, much more important > in fact, than providing a "snazzy" interface. And if you insist on a snazzy > interface, spend a little more time and make it work in all known browsers, > including a text browser. > Right. That's why I support laws that will require governments to provide their services in open, documented formats. I'm getting tired of MSIE-only sites, or documents for download that are available as a very funky Word document and not PDF. > > Note that I never support closed formats. They are a major form of > > headaches, and even Microsoft got a bad reputation for lackof proper > > backwards compatibility between its (at least Hebrew) office versions. A > > vendor should always document his formats or else I'll never choose to buy > > his products. (albeit it's perfectly legitimate for others to burn > > themselves at that - it's a free world.). > > These close formats are exactly the reason Microsoft got its monopoly. They > don't care if *you* buy their product - everyone else does :( > Microsoft got its monopoly from many reasons. They can be summed up as that they were the smartest of software companies up to now, and all the rest did huge strategical mistakes. BTW, Microsoft Excel can save and load documents from/to tab-delimited files, CSV files, Lotus 1-2-3, etc. For more information on why it's desirable read: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html (one of Spolsky's finest) The reason people switched to MS Office from Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect was that Microsoft gave away its software for free to training centres. (while other companies were not smart enough to do so). It still does. Plus, these programs were written in Assembly and as such were very hard to port to Windows 3.11, and eventually Win32. Microsoft wrote its software in C, and eventually Moore's First Law was on their side. Closed formats have very little to do with it. I think Microsoft would have achieved its monopoly even if it fully documented all of its formats. (perhaps even faster, as third-party developers would have been very happy to adopt them). Regards, Shlomi Fish [1] - Or do they? I don't assume Microsoft is stupid, because you should never think so about your rival. If I were Microsoft, I would discretely and internally port all my software to UNIX, so I can later ship it on Linux and other UNIXes. I think Microsoft realizes that the shift to Linux is inevitable, but it can still survive by selling software for it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ Writing a BitKeeper replacement is probably easier at this point than getting its license changed. Matt Mackall on OFTC.net #offtopic. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
