Date: Sat, 18 Jan 1997 13:47:05 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: dennis@etinc.com (dennis) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Commerical applications (was: Development and validation Message-ID: <199701182047.NAA12461@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970118123420.00a8f600@etinc.com> from "dennis" at Jan 18, 97 12:34:22 pm
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> >3) MS markets itself to large corps well. Witness the Corel vs. > >Microsoft wordprocessor suite fight. > > > > Uh, I think that their billion dollar marketing budget is THE reason. > You can brainwash the public with that much money (ie Bill > Clinton)...and they are masters of the brainwash. Also they > do have some pretty good products (aside from their networking), > again if you throw enough money at a problem a solution is > likely to pop up eventually. This logic is flawed. Microsoft Money did not beat Quicken. Microsoft's success arises from it being the first to be second in any market, with an incrementally better product. This is, incidently, the same reason for the success of most Japanese marketing to the US. Demming told the world this formula. Apparently only Microsoft an Japan listened, because it take more than a 3 month fiscal horizon to implement, and a publically held company can not think more than 3 months ahead because that's when the next quarterly report will impact the stock prices, and short term value of the stock price is what motivates the board. Microsoft was able to listen because Bill is the Majority stockholder, and he can ignore the board. Look what happened to Apple when Steve Jobs was no longer able to force the long view on them. Now they are realizing their mistake, but NeXTStep is too little, too late: it's now almost decade-old technology. That's why Apple wooed Be, Inc. over BeOS; it was a mistake not to pay Gassee's price... one they may not live to regret. This formula happens to match, dead-on, with the history of all of Microsoft's successes and failures: Successes: Original product Microsoft 2nd to market ----------------------------- ----------------------------- CP/M DOS Mac "Finder" Windows OS/2 Windows95 WordPerfect Word Harvard Project Project Lotus 1-2-3 Excel AppWare OLE/ActiveX Turbo C Microsoft C Turbo C++ Visual C NetScape Internet Explorer etc. etc. ----------------------------- ----------------------------- Failures (under Microsoft management): Microsoft 1st to market ----------------------------- OS/2 Money LAN Manager Xenix etc. ----------------------------- And in some respects, FreeBSD has refused to learn this lesson, being too proud to be 2nd to market with Linux technology (or SVR4 technology) because "it's not BSD'ish enough"). Foo. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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