On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 01:27:45PM +0000, optimus wrote: > On Saturday 16 August 2003 03:07 pm, Holden Hao wrote: > > > > 27 schools, >1M pesos per school in last five years, > > > with more to come. Total 50M pesos in last five years, > > I read last night that Microsoft's extremely agitated with the prospect of > Thailand going open source. They're planning to remove the online activation > code during setup of Windows XP and bundle it with Office XP. And the bundle > price for the two is.... > > US $ 35.00 for Thai users. > > This low, low price smacks near of being antitrustic. I could foresee them > offering the base OS in the future for free, while trying to make money from > Office. Sort of offering IE to beat Netscape out of the market. > > That's how desperate they've become, even if they've keep some government key > account contracts in Europe.
They're not desperate at all. Keep in mind that Microsoft has US$50B (billion) cash on hand. That is literally cash that the company has in bank accounts. That is a staggering amount of money, as if I have to tell you that. Microsoft has around 60,000 employees, that's nearly US$1,000,000 per employee. How'd they get all that cash? Monopoly profits. If you've had an introductory economics class, then you probably learned about how a monopoly operates. And people have been pointing out for years the Microsoft's consumer operating systems are overpriced. When you see that they're dropping their prices to a certain amount, what's really happening is that they're giving up monopoly profits. That's interesting because it means that they now have competition, finally. But they made out like bandits during the heyday. You'll know when they're desperate, but that'll be years from now. Michael -- Michael Darrin Chaney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.michaelchaney.com/ -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
