Microsoft's Newest Challenger: Moore's Law

Business 2.0 ^ | 28 August 2002 | Eric Hellweg

[ShadowAce]

Ping

[rdb3]

The Penguin Ping.

Wanna be Penguified? Just holla!

Got root?

[glorgau]

Star Office? Its a bit cheaper.

[ShadowAce]

As is OpenOffice.org.

[Sundog]

I have observed a correlary to Moore's Law which might be expressed this way:

Any hardware, twice as fast, will be upgraded with software four times slower. Any doubling of hard disk capacity will be met with the need for four times as much disk space. The doubling of bandwidth of a bus will be burdened with four times the data to carry, and the user interface for all of this will be designed by a group of idiot-savants still in love with the Microsoft Mistique.

Cheers.

[rdb3]

Microsoft doesn't appear too worried, telling News.com: "With over 300 million users worldwide, Microsoft Office has become the choice of individuals who need to be more productive and organizations who need a reliable set of tools to run their businesses."

That's a "bob and weave" statement. While it is true that MS Office is the de facto standard for business, it's not necessarily true that this was the result of "the choice of individuals."

If an individual bought a new box with Windows XP/2000/etc. that came with Office as well, that individual wasn't too much in a hurry to go out and buy another office suite. Couple that with the fact virtually all companies use Office and the true meaning of the word "choice" vanishes.

I don't want to see MS "toppled," per se. What I want to see is good, quality software. And I don't care who makes it.

[AFreeBird]

LOL... Eloquently put.

[AFreeBird]

Beat me to it. I was going to say that Micro$oft should be careful throwing out words like choice. People might actually start to wonder about alternative choices.

Well, forget I said that! :-)

[dennisw]

MS Office reels in more $$$$ to Redmond WA than do their sales for operating systems.

[ShadowAce]

Yes it does, but it also has more competition. Hopefully, that will drive it to a better price/performance ratio.

[dennisw]

Fact is these so called "office suites" are mature products. So is the Windows operating system. Any number of parties can churn them out.

This is why Micro$haft's true profit center is product activation and other anti-piracy efforts. Why their major effort is to make sure everyone pays and business customers get skinned alive by "renting" software. Not being able to outright own it.
Also the reason for their absurd DOTnet stuff. What business in their right mind wants their data and applications sitting somewhere in info-space on a Micro$haft server?

[dennisw]

[rdb3]

Also the reason for their absurd DOTnet stuff. What business in their right mind wants their data and applications sitting somewhere in info-space on a Micro$haft server?

I'll be honest here. Since I already knew VB and C++, I was interested in learning C#. But I wasn't about to pay that load of dough for the suite. But now Mojo has taken care of that for us *nix users, so I'm learning it. It's like a cross between C++ and Java so it's not entirely new to me.

Outside of that, I haven't really studied up on the .NET business strategy, so I can't truthfully comment on it one way or the other.

Guess I'll do that now.

[rdb3]

Lindows. Have they changed it where the user isn't always "root?" If not, the users are going to destroy their systems in no time flat.

[Malcolm]

Hey, Dennis! Where is the Start button on Lindows? Thx, Malcolm

[Tokhtamish]

Don't you know that the guy who designed C# was the same guy who designed Delphi ?

[TechJunkYard]

Microsoft Office, costs north of $450 --almost as much or sometimes more than the entire cost of a PC itself.... Microsoft is finding itself at odds with Moore's Law. Prices for technology have dropped, but office software has risen.

This is my pet peeve about "commercial" software generally - not just Microsoft. We know that certain packages are priced way out of bounds, merely to segment or limit the market (not everyone needs Microsoft Project or RealServer or PhotoShop, but someone might want to try it out if the price were lower).

And, contrary to a widely held perception of the typical Open Source advocate, I do not have a problem with paying for software! But make it a reasonable price, based on the usefulness of the software... not just because Marketing thinks it can charge $x and still get buyers (gotta cover the CEO's stock options).

Reasonable pricing might reduce the piracy problem as well. If I wanted to "try" something priced above $y (a reasonable value to me, based on what I plan to do with it) I might be inclined to obtain a cracked copy. And then continue to use the cracked version as a protest against the market price, rather than to go buy a valid license for something I have found useful.

Microsoft doesn't appear too worried, telling News.com: "With over 300 million users worldwide, Microsoft Office has become the choice of individuals who need to be more productive and organizations who need a reliable set of tools to run their businesses."

We've got mostly everybody addicted to the "pure" stuff, and if they want it, they have to come to us.

[rdb3]

That's news to me.