Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/01/18
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Except if you bough MS Stock 2 years ago you would have more than doubled your money. - -----Original Message----- From: Alexey Merz [mailto:alexey@webcom.com] Sent: Monday, January 18, 1999 6:17 AM To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us Subject: [Leica] Re: Microsoft bashing (off topic) "Andreas Frijdal" <frijdal@tin.it>: >Everybody with some sense of history knows that capitalism produces >guys like Bill Gates (or the like to oil barons and the train people). >Wallstreet considered Apple dead. I doubt if the lollipops will save >them Well, Wall Street was wrong, and those who ignored Wall Street and bought Apple stock 2-3 years ago are now doing rather nicely. Apple has posted several consecutive quarters of profit (note that Compac has posted large losses over the same interval) and the iMac is the single best-selling personal computer, with 7% market share. Apple does not control the PC market, but the PC market matters less and less every day. It is now apparent that MS will not control either of the two key markets on which it has pegged its future. It will not control embedded consumer devices like cell phones and set-top boxes: MS may obtain significant market share but it will not own the field as it has done with PC's. Consumers are unlikely to care about the MS brand in these settings. A variety of standards will prevail, with many companies producing products as cheap and as useful as those from Redmond. And MS will not control the corporate database or web server markets. Win2K/NT5 contains well over 30 million lines of new code, delivered as a single bolus. Even MS cannot adequately evaluate that much new code for reliability. For that reason, mission-critical NT applications will crash - and crash more often than with gradually evolved and highly tuned systems like Unix/Linux-Apache (for web service) or Solaris/HPUnix- Oracle8 (for relational databases). The consensus amongst web pros whom I've spoken to and read is that an NT4 web server can go perhaps 200,000 hits between reboots, while a Linux/Apache server can do at least *100-FOLD* better. Y'all think NT5 will will be 100-fold more relaiable than NT4, with >30 million lines of new code? Even if it is, it will only be AS GOOD AS its free, open-source competition, which has already established dominance in that market sector. So Gates will participate in, but not control, two key strategic areas that will ultimately be far more important than the PC OS and its applications. The PC and its software are already being reduced to a (large) niche market with commodity pricing. In such a setting, MS cannot do either of the things that have been critical to its success. It cannot use its control of (and proprietary information about) the OS to lock out other applications developers. And it cannot retain high profit margins in what is rapidly becoming a commodity market. The DOJ lawsuit against Microsoft may be deserved, but it is not needed. Microsoft has already lost its ability to control the course of events in critical markets. It will be interesting to see if MS can figure out what to do without the explosive growth that has driven them through the last decade. IBM didn't. - -Alexey .......................................................................... Alexey Merz | URL: http://www.webcom.com/alexey | email: alexey@webcom.com | PGP public key: http://pgp5.ai.mit.edu/ | voice:503/494-6840