E-mails give peek at Microsoft strategies

[warpete]

An Example----Windows ME

I believe that Windows ME is only a Windows 98 Service Pack update, but Microsoft charged big dollars for it anyway.

Microsoft not gouging?

MS has $52+Billion in cash. No other company in the world in a competitive environment has ever done that in the short time that MS has.
They have so obviously leveraged their monolopy position to enable them to gouge the public that anyone can see by the end result they have been robbing the public. There are other products that do all the same jobs -Star Office is basically free- for less money but people are afraid to use them because they don't understand the complexity of the enviroment and ms is their security blanket. Therefore, the gov has to protect the public from being preyed upon by the monopolist.

Not just wild profits, but Market not-shared

Anybody seen a Job posting that asked for a resume in Wordperfect format ? Text ? HTML ? No, it's ALWAYS MS-Word format that's required.

I bought my Star Office - it is not only inexpensive [$45] easy to install and handles more formats than MS-Office - but uses a fraction of the memory and is not intent on planting a very difficult to remove shortcut on my desktop (we all know how to make a shortcut, if desired). Star Office, like Linux, can run on 'older' PC's (like 386,486, and Pentium I class).

If we wanted to select an Operating System for a PC at any major retailer - we can't... All one can do is 'Dual-boot' because you already bought MS-OS, it's pre-installed (with MSN, AOL and Compuserve, as a 'service' to you - some of which can be uninstalled [you must locate the empty folders and delete them 'manually' however]).

After all, this market dominance is what killed the superior OS/2 [from that puny little upstart company 'IBM'], and has anyone noticed that NTFS is not so easy to migrate back off of [it's not entirely compatible with many 'competing' OS's and is propietary [meaning that MS will sue you if you figure out how to manuver using undocumented features, and write code to do so - as well as 'upgrade' anytime to generate incompatibility issues]. this ocured while IBM had reduced the OS/2 'Kernel' to under 4Mb, while MS-Windows was beginning it's apparently unstoppable sprawl at about 32 Mb - with WIN-95 (XP kernel has grown quite a bit since then, and won't even work on 'older' PC's either - but then the vendors LIKE it when we are forced to upgrade hardware too).

Summary: Not only over 80% margin on each sale, but complete control of the market as well. Big and mean enough to kill off IBM... So far no U.S. Legal case has aimed at both of those points accurately.

P.S. Check the fine print in SUN's Star Office - the license is for 5 machines, that's under $10 each - many homes have several computers yet can stay legal with Star Office. MS-Office is typically Single license for A LOT MORE money. If I need more than 5 installs, I'd buy another Star Office just to support the company that's cllearly delivering reasonable value to me.