Re: www.microsoft.com sure needs a lot of silicon

>And preloads of Office aren't that common, most people get it through
>retail purchases. And Win95 has been in the top 5 for retail sales
>for 18 months straight now --- It would be a success without any
>preloads at all.

Office has been in the middle of a price war with Corel's suite. The VARs, through their organ, Computer Reseller News, complained that mail order computer makers were allowed to bundle Office at $35 per seat. So M$, which has strong relations with the "channel," ONE DAY LATER, no less than Steve Ballmer assured the channel that they would not be competitively disadvantaged.

But Office, in today's culture, is considered to be the premier office suite. I picked up a copy of Office97Pro at a computer show for $160. I wanted it for Access. One click and I converted a text string to a DB with one of Access wizards. I linked the forms created with FrontPage97, with a few clicks (none of this automation, by the way, is supported by Unix) to the Access DB, without touching CGI or HTML)(I only hope OLE DB replaces SQL soon!).

Of course, the empowerment of the desktop is completed lost on Unix "elites." The desktop OS is subsuming the minicomputer and, now its OS. The NC is a brillant stroke to counter this basic technological trend. However, in 5 years, we will have a mainframe on the desktop for a few dollars more in silicon.

The computer itself for do more and more for the user, while the purists YOWL about bloat, inefficiency, lack of quality, loss of jobs to the GUI barbarians who cost their companies so much money, etc.

Only Rhapsody has a chance to challenge NT for supremacy in the server/DB enterprise marketplace.

Win95 was technologically compromised, unlike OS2, to support legacy apps, hardware, the whole PC industry apparatus.

If Rhapsody does not support the Mac user, it doesn't matter how technologically advanced it is, it will have dealt itself a fatal blow, if history is any guide.

You know, the conspiracy theorists, appear as merely biased to those who lived through these periods when OSes, apps, and various hardware products competed.

Five years from now, some of these same people will be producing the same revisionists histories--telling us things like, well, if it weren't for M$ monolopy or whatever, Amiga or some such would have been the dominent OS; even though we know few in the general public even know what Amiga is. But, of course, there will be no convincing the conspiracy theorist.

Don't email with your best shame-ridden remarks. Received on Tue Apr 29 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT