> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gill, Kathy [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Monday, October 26, 1998 4:00 PM
> If anyone can remember if we figured out what the configuration is on the
> individual's end that makes this happen, please re-post.
Bill Houle tells me that the reason is that I have "Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]"
in my outgoing headers. That's my permanent email address, and I cannot
send mail from it, only tell it where to forward messages sent to that
address, so I have to have that Reply-to header. It seems to me that a
great many people would be in the position of wanting messages sent to
them to go to a different address than that from which they send.
This situation hasn't arisen for me before, and I've been using email
on the net since the mid-70's. I assume that other list servers just
change the Reply-to field before re-transmitting the message.
> > Yeah, poor little Netscape, a $650,000,000 company ...
> Interesting sarcasm. Do you have any idea how much it costs to develop and
> market products
Yes, I do. I've had or been associated with a number of successful
commercial products (and a large number of military ones) starting with
CP-67/CMS in the 60's and including the UCSD P-System. $650 million is
a HUGE annual revenue for a company with so few products.
> particularly when the bulk of your product line is FREE,
But they make up for it in volume. Seriously, I should feel sorry
for them because they made a dumb decision? And don't tell me that
MS forced them to give their browser away; history is littered with
examples of free or inexpensive software that was driven out of the
market by more expensive but much better replacements. Heck, that's
how NS started out, competing with free Mosaic by building something
better and charging for it.
> Netscape is surviving because a lot of people are gambling that
> they will be able to hang in long enough to prove a viable
> competitor to MSFT.
That's a very thought-provoking statement. I don't think you're
referring to NS investors, although they certainly are gambling.
I think you're saying that a lot of web developers are investing
effort in making their sites work with the NS browser, at a fair
cost to their clients or employers. This is true, I do it myself
when forced (it's not always possible; the work necessary to make
my Expanding Outlines (Mill-Creek-Systems.com/WebTips/ExpandingOutline)
function under NS is easily ten times what it took on MS.)
OK, if NS succeeds, what do those gamblers win? Emotional satisfaction?
Not a good criteria for business decisions.
> > ... twenty-five years ago. IBM had a larger share of
> > the market and more of a strangle-hold on it, but they were squashed,
> >
> IBM. Squashed? I don't think so ...
IBM was as much as 90% of the entire computer industry; they dominated
it in a way that Microsoft can only dream about. Imagine if the total
revenue of Intel, Sun, Oracle, Dell, Compaq, current IBM, Cisco, Yahoo,
AMD, etc. etc. totaled $1.6 billion to Microsoft's $14.5 billion?
Sure, IBM is still huge, about five times the size of Microsoft, but
they're tiny compared to the current size of the industry.
> I'm not sure which economy you think you live in, Bob. But as several
> economists have pointed out (and DOJ is learning), there is absolutely no
> correlation between "innovative product" and "market share" in an
> infrastructure-related product (telephone, railroad tracks, PC-OS).
Economists? You believe something that economists say?
Your examples are interesting. The railroads were supplanted by
the automobile, much as IBM's mainframes were supplanted by PCs.
The big telephone companies (note the plural; it's not just AT&T
anymore) are scared to death of some upstart running a fiber optic
to your house and giving you digital TV, net access, and telephone
service.
> The costs to competitor are too great (barrier to entry -- [1]
> how the hell do you get on the WinOS desktop if you are a competitor?
Build better software than they do.
> [2] how do you compete with a company that can offer deals like MSFT
> does to ISPs, hey, give away MSIE and we'll throw in NT software, etc
etc.).
Build better software than they do.
And this isn't impossible. I've built operating systems, word processors,
spreadsheets (in 1968), email handlers, and such. True, they were
primitive compared to Windows, MS Word, Excel, etc, but they also
had to run on astonishingly smaller machines. The cost of doing a whole
new set of these from scratch, much easier to use than what we have now
and providing easy migration from it, wouldn't be anywhere near as
large as, say, Netscape's annual revenue.
Of course, you'd have to do it all in Ada.
Bob Munck
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