Microsoft's Newest Challenger: Moore's Law

Business 2.0 ^ | 28 August 2002 | Eric Hellweg

[TechJunkYard]

Outside of that, I haven't really studied up on the .NET business strategy.... Guess I'll do that now.

Do let us know your conclusions and the links you used.. tia..

[dennisw]

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

Your Lindows desktop is your start button :)

[Bush2000]

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?

Dennis, it's pretty obvious to anyone who's worked with the .NET Framework that you simply don't know what you're talking about. You might want to actually try reading the documentation and writing some code for .NET before you arrive at such bogus conclusions. .NET -- the software developer entity -- is merely an application compiler and framework. It is essentially analogous to Sun's J2EE framework; so, it is wholly independent of Microsoft online services such as MSN and Passport. Microsoft isn't forcing customers to put their data and applications on its own servers. You simply pulled that out of your ass.

What's confusing you is that MS has been branding nearly all of its software and services with .NET as a marketing label when, in fact, few of them have anything to do with the .NET application framework. The MS marketers jumped the gun on this one, in my opinion. But people (like you) who have leaped to the conclusion that .NET = MS software rental are simply full of shit.

[ninenot]

Yeah, BUT:

MS is now almost to the point of being "COBOL." There's such an investment in the stuff that to abandon it might cost MORE than to maintain.

Of course, MS has to make it 'cheap to maintain' for the installed base to remain loyal and inertia-fat.

[john in missouri]

But people (like you) who have leaped to the conclusion that .NET = MS software rental are simply full of shit.

Oh, come on now. Why don't you tell 'im what you really think?

[js1138]

Last time I looked, Office XP was on sale at Office Max and Target for $150. True it says "Academic Version", but who's kidding whom? When it's on the retail shelves, that's the price.

[ninenot]

...and there can be legitimate business reasons for warehousing data on another server, secured...

[CWRWinger]

In 1995, I bought 'PerfectWorks" by Novell for $40 at a hole-in-the-wall computer shop. Even though I'm using MS Office, I still go back to PerfectWorks because of all the neat templates and financial programs which came with it. However, it's compatible only with itself. But still an exceptional value and still useable after all these years.

[dheretic]

Last time I looked, Office XP was on sale at Office Max and Target for $150. True it says "Academic Version", but who's kidding whom? When it's on the retail shelves, that's the price.

Better have your academic ID ready. If they catch you trying to pull a fast one you'd probably get arrested and prosecuted for that. Everywhere around here requires that you show an academic ID of some kind. If nothing more that means you get your k-12 neighbor to buy it for you for $20+retail cost (can you say easy money for school kids?!)...

So the moral of the story is...... get someone to buy it for you. The store really won't care. $140 in revenue for an academic version is a whole hell of a lot better than $0. (Microsoft usually ships academic versions at cost-of-production-and-shipping to these stores).

[fnord]

are you using Lindows?

I'm interested in hearing how it performs with MS software ...

[discostu]

My old company was big into that. Our customer base was schools, it's well known in the school "biz" that schools are run by C students (exactly the type of people willing to take a 30% cut in pay in exchange for great job security). The sell was pretty easy: who do you want in charge of your backups, people who can find and keep work in the private sector or peole that can't?

[Utopia]

[gore3000]

You can still get that deal now. You can get WP9 (one or two versions back), Quattro Pro, and graphics packages for some $50. These are good programs and just as capable as anything in MS Office. The menus may be a bit different, but the capabilities are about equal.