On Tue, 30 Jan 2007 at 13.27.41 -0600, Mike Miller wrote: > On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, rwh wrote: > > MS is screwed. Mac and Linux will keep on chipping away at their OS > > market share. As people move to more open document standards the > > dominance of Office will start to erode as well. Just look at the Zune > > and try not to laugh out loud ... an MP3 player that only a Soviet could > > love :-) > > I hope you are right, but I have my doubts. I think Microsoft can compete > much better than they are right now. Apple has to be about 20 times as > good just to keep up - inertia such as it is. When Microsoft starts to > feel like it's losing, it will come out with better products. I believe > they can do it because they have the money. They just need to hire the > right people, focus the money on develompent, and they'll have something. You are ignoring a lot of evidence. The blogs are filled with info coming out of Microsoft about how much of a lumbering behemoth that company has become. Engineers buried under layers upon layers upon layers of management. Source code changes can take 3-6 months just to get from one end of the company to the other. These aren't things one fixes just by throwing money at the problem, and that grants that there is even someone at the company with vision enough to make the needed changes, but I will not grant that fact. Never mind the historical evidence to the contrary. E.g. IBM which was another `unstoppable monopoly.' Unfortunately (for the anti-capitalists), IBM fell from dominance not because of trustbusting, but because mainframes were rendered obsolete by desktop computing, and they did not adapt to this fact. It's not all about who controls the means of production if one has the insight to turn an industry on its head. Also, Karl Marx is wearing no clothes. -- Sidney CAMMERESI http://www.cheesecake.org/sac/