Re: Cost of the M$ monopoly-$10BIllion/year.

In article <1122473825.052168.230030@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
imouttahere@xxxxxxx says...


So your back... cool. always nice to have sentient participants in a
newsgroup.

> Mayor of R'lyeh wrote:
> > I don't really care how Microsoft does their internal financials. All
> > I care about is that they are part of the process that provides me
> > with a soution to my needs/wants at a price I want to pay.
>
> Funny, they don't do that for me. IE6 is a dinosaur,

True. Fortunately, having a browser built into the OS is useful
primarily as an easy way to download a better browser via http. :-)

> Windows was last
> updated in late 200-fucking-ONE, and that was just mostly a crappy
> reskinning of Win2k which was RTM'd in 1999, a whole IT lifetime ago,
> and Win2k wasn't anything that great over NT4 other than better DirectX
> and USB support.

Yes, yet it it *still* offers more for most corporate needs than the
alternatives. I wish that wasn't the case, but it is. Yes, some tasks,
particularly on the back-end can be (and often should be) migrated off to
alternate platforms, but for the typical worker bee, Windows still has a
headlock on the competition.

Things like openoffice are headed in the right direction, but still too
slow, and not functional enough. So, Microsoft is changing file formats
again, supposedly to support open standards (XML), but I suspect it's
really more about changing things to make it harder on openoffice and
similar products.

> Their office suite is a joke.

Hardly. It's a major cash cow, and it's almost impossible to buy a
corporate desktop from a major vendor without it bundled in. Could it be
better, yeah. Does a better overall solution exist out there,
unfortunately, no.

> The only thing good from Microsoft is Visual Studio,

Interesting. I hate it, but if I was doing C# work on Windows, I suppose
I might feel differently about that. I spent about 10 years behind it,
practically 7 days a week, and used the DOS and CLI MSVC versions along
with MASM for a long time prior to that. As each pass came along, I came
closer and closer to moving to something else. Today lots of
alternatives are available for things other than .NET especially.

> but over the past 3 years Apple has been closing that
> gap (not fast enough, but the gap is closing;

Please. Xcode is nice. gcc on PPC is horrid. Sure, it compiles the
same code, but the generation is very weak. However, if you are willing
to give up on floating point with respect to IEEE, then gcc -fast does a
pretty good job in some cases.

> Whidbey is so late that
> Microsoft actually mailed me a "beta", for free no less.

If you were an MSDN subscriber getting betas in the mail wouldn't be a
surprise, but you'd be paying for them.

> I don't deny Apple's machines have been priced much higher than eg.
> Dell in many cases.

So is basically everybody in the industry with a serious product
offering. Dell simply kicks everyone's *** in efficiency.

> When they move to x86 we'll be able to see how much
> to the bull*** reason above you charge and how much was the due to the
> price penalty of having to go to 2nd-banana suppliers for their CPUs
> and motherboards, not to mention develop their own motherboard
> chipsets.

I doubt they will ever be able to compete dollar to dollar with Dell on
price. The Dell direct model, economies of scale, and a 15 year
advantage on most aspects of high-volume scalable manufacturing will keep
it that way. If Apple was to capture 10% of the market (a pipe dream
from here), then they *might* invest enough in optimizing (and cloning
dell's pipeline process) to catch up, but don't hold your breath.

The question will continue to be: Does OS X offer enough advantages to
make the price delta worth it?

> Apple was not ripping off its customers 2001-2003, when it was barely
> breaking even. I think they made something like $100M profit total over
> those 3 years.

They could rip off their customers, even while losing money. Customers
care more about getting a good, stable, quality and functional product
for their money than the profit margins. During 01-03, there was little
or nothing in the Mac product line that was going to attract switchers.
That says a lot.

> Well, economies of scale have a lot to do with it. Microsoft went for
> mainstream early, while Apple was happy to push the state of the art
> forward. This has meant Windows provides an inferior solution to more
> hardware, while Apple (and NeXT) focused on superior solutions for
> people who were willing to pay for them.

Agree.

> LOL. Like anybody gives a *** what is said in csma.

Very, very true.

--
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"I don't really care about being right you know,
I just care about success." --Steve Jobs
.