(Snort!) Ooooo-kay.
Posted on 04/03/2003 6:38:11 AM PST by md2576
PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O , the world's No. 1 software maker, on Wednesday said it is taking aim at privately held Google Inc., the Web-search company that's so popular its name is used as a verb.
"We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That's something that we're actively looking at doing," Bob Visse, director of marketing for Microsoft's MSN Internet services division, said.
Visse said the company was making some significant investments in developing a better search engine. But the company has not offered specific plans.
Microsoft would not be the first Web portal provider to step into the Web search segment. Last month, Internet media company Yahoo Inc. YHOO.O closed its $235 million purchase of Internet-search company Inktomi Corp.
Microsoft has said its been searching for ways to capitalize on its various technologies, for example data retrieval and analysis, by entering new markets. It has also targeted security software.
Google, the No. 1 Web-search provider, has become so pervasive that it is not uncommon for people to refer to searching the Internet as "googling."
A Google representative could not be immediately reached for comment.
Google has been seen as a top IPO candidate despite a lagging economy, but a company co-founder recently told attendees at a high-tech conference that going public is not on the front burner for the Silicon Valley company.
Ditto on the flash and animation. I keep a post-it note around to put over the top of some exceptionally bad graphics. Just because a web designer can create graphics that induce seizures doesn't mean he should.
I think MS will have to throw up their hands at some point. Unless of course, Bill Gates decides to buy them out. But, I don't see that happening either.
The notion that someone has "too much" wealth is decidely socialist. Every socialist deems himself fit to judge how much of everything everyone else should have. I got an idea that would make you the richest man in the world. Make a better product than Bill Gates and charge a little less. In short, quit bitching about the state of the world and take actual steps to make it better.
LOL! And it won't work on a Mac. That, or Mac users will have to wait until the Mac version comes out 2 years later. ;o)
By the above I am not declaring Gates an evil bucket of pond scum -- I am merely pointing out that it is more complex than the way you have framed it.
(Snort!) Ooooo-kay.
Yet "want" was the very verb you used. Wanting to communicate that document falls under providing people what they want. As you're probably aware, standard formats have been adopted such as delimited text files and rich text format for sharing documents between different software. Make your software capable of doing that.
corporations have decided to standardize on one. And they don't care about the cost because: (a) they just pass it on to their customers, and (b) they get huge price discounts because they buy in volume.
Corporations don't care about cost, because they can just pass it on? How do they ever lose money if costs have so little importance? Maybe if you're the post office and have a government enforced monopoly on your core business, but the free market has to deal with consumers, who can avoid your higher costs by seeking alternatives. (Post office is learning people are finding alternatives to them as well, monopoly or not...) There are indeed price discounts for bulk buys, but they're still more than $10 a license, or free. Microsoft as you probably know touts its TCO vs Linux by promising greater ease of use, interoperability, etc. It's amusing to watch people bitch about the price of MS products, and then bitch when MS offers products for free. The man will have detractors regardless, I just find so much of it baseless.
Again you make it sound simple. But it isn't. Microsoft deliberately "breaks" the file format with each release. In fact, they even break their own format, so that a version of Word released in 1996, which still works perfectly fine on Win95, is not capable of reading in a Word document generated from Word on WinXP. Since the corps upgrade, they are not impacted, but the consumers are.
If you make a word processor (WP) that generates a delimited text file, you may be sure that your software will not be able to read in the file format generated by the next version of Word. And it requires "reverse engineering" of the file formats to get your WP up to speed -- and meanwhile everyone in the corporate world who has upgraded can no longer communicate with you.
This reason, and this reason alone, is why most of the world uses Word and not other WP's. Because as I am sure you are aware, the vast majority of people who use a WP only need the following features:
(1) Basic formatting
(2) Spell check
(3) Table of contents and index.
That's it. Very few consumers (not business users) use a WP for its advanced features. Logically, therefore, there should be a market for $10 WP's. But there isn't (any longer.) The $10 WP makers are out of business because most people won't buy a product that produces a file that cannot be read in by the people with whom they need to communicate. Interestingly, several years ago there used to be quite a number of WP makers. They are defunct because the common file format kept changing and their customers became dissatisfied.
If we could just got this done, Goole is finished!
Gates will claim that the search engine is an integral part of the operating system. Your computer will default to MS-Search and nag the bejeezus out of you if you try to use any other search engine.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.