97% sober and locked on Zurich...

Khare (rohit@uci.edu)
Sat, 17 Jan 1998 19:19:37 -0800


Adam is sleeping while I am up here on my twelfth shot of something or
other, enjoying the view of two spectacular women who are somehow
studiously avoiding the laptop-equipped, book-toting stud in 26C.

I wake him up... So instead of ogling, we speak of Nanosoft... The current
cover of BusinessWeek (1/19/98) offers us much fodder for stuporific
enlightenment (& 97% evidence).

Nice "Lawrence" Ellison quote in 1/19/98 businessweek cover
story..."It's kind of like Microsoft vs. Mankind, and mankind is the
underdog...".

The 3% of the market is not running Windows (86%), but rather DOS (2.3%) or
Apple's Macintosh "It MUST be an OS -- after all it integrates MS Internet
Explorer to 'browse' the net" OS (4.6%) [of total units sold in 1997]

"Office"s -- at least those not kowtowing to the multi-hundred-$$$
"Microsoft Certified Office'97 (87%) Professional" propaganda -- are using
SmartSuite (6%) or Corel (4.7%).

Of course, don't feel MS is winning everything: after all, they play 14%
(Money) to 82% (Quicken). Intranet web servers, the 4% is Novell; 36% Unix,
and a paltry, underdog, 55% for NT.

And, you know, the 3% *are* using MS databases: 4% vs. 38.4% Oracle, 21%
IBM, 9.7% Informix, 6.9% Sybase, and 5% Computer Associates.

Don't think of Microsoft as an oppressed software vendor, think of them as
a pathetically tiny travel agent, doing a mere two million bookings a week
on Expedia (but, seriously, how many bookings and how many sales? we
already went through how CRS/GDSes make money churning transactions through
instead of sell-through...)

fading to sleep on our second redeye in two days,
Rohit & Adam