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Invisible wrote:
> Nobody buys MS because they like it. They buy MS because there's nothing
> else on offer.
Right. Because neither Apple nor Linux are significant. And we all know
there were no competing operating systems available when MS-DOS hit the scene.
The basic problem is that an OS is a natural monopoly, and it's also an
ecosystem for the software that runs on it. Nobody buys an OS for an OS's
sake. They buy it to run programs, and MS if nothing encourages programmers
to write programs for non-programmers. Apple is a hardware company, and
while they do good stuff, their economic model is more limiting due to that
control.
Linux is free. And it's still not good enough to get people to abandon
Microsoft's (or Apple's) stuff for desktop work. Even when the product runs
Linux and there are thousands of Linux servers, the companies are still
using MS and Apple on the desktop, because the Linux apps just aren't there
yet to support business users. And the Linux apps that *are* killer apps
are open, so they get ported to Apple and Microsoft anyway. :-)
In the places where Microsoft competes but haven't quite hit exactly the
right price/performance/reliability/etc ratio, there's all kinds of
competition. What are the most popular cell phones? WinCE-based phones? Name
two other popular gaming consoles that Microsoft doesn't make? Name some
free email services besides Hotmail? Some desktop conferencing besides MS's?
There's definitely a network effect going on, and Microsoft definitely
squashed a lot of competition by contracting to have their stuff on every
machine sold for a while, but it's the network effects and the availability
of the kind of business software that you and I don't really use that keeps
Microsoft rolling.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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