> I wonder why you're so fixated on these Redmond people. They're pretty
> much invisible from where I sit. If some people insist to play the
> hypnotized bunny, they do seem to have an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Gene, the problem you're experiencing is market myopia. It's pretty easy to
ignore Microsoft when you're in an academic or scientific community, especially
outside of the US. (Doing a small project for the University of Texas right now,
shocked to discover that they've become predominantly an MS shop, in the College
of Nat.Sci. no less, where the CS dept. resides!) OTOH, if you want to make
money building and selling systems, esp. in any kind of an enterprise or B2B
sense, it's pretty hard to ignore MS. They impact every aspect of your
business...
Beberg's got it right, for once. ;-) The problem is that Microsoft defines their
market, eventually, as "anything useful to our customers, which runs on our
platform." Given that they have advantageous control of the base of the
distribution channel --- the platform itself --- how can anyone compete with
them? Note that the core of their competitive competency is the strategic
importance and exclusive control of that codebase and their ability to tie to it,
*not* any particular innovations, quality, or price competition.
jb
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 29 2001 - 20:25:47 PDT