[vox] OT: Contemplating the unthinkable...

[vox@lists.lugod.org]

Well, as of today I am no longer a RHAT shareholder, primarly because of
the way they've been handling the discontinuation of desktop RedHat;
I've no problem with them moving it to a community-oriented project, and
even dropping phone support isn't that big of a problem; what bugs me is
that the one thing RedHat had going for it was mindshare.  It's name was
synonomous with 'Linux', primarily because of its penetration in the
Linux desktop arena.  They have now given up that leverage with the
whole Fedora bit, and with the Novell-SuSE merger, methinks they will be
facing very stiff competition in the enterprice market.

Then again, this assumes Novell doesn't fsck things up like they usually
do; my company would have used NDS if we could have gotten it to work on
Debian and Solaris, but, alas, it was pretty unusuable.  Then again,
SuSE has some fantastic engineers (I almost ended up working for them).

So, I've made a decent profit from our friends at Red Hat (bought at
$4.68, sold at $13.11), and I'm looking for places to invest it.  This
is where the 'contemplating the unthinkable' comes in -- Our Friends In
Redmond have, to my investor eyes, a rather appealing stock.  I don't
care for their (lack of) business ethics much, but I'm also well aware
that the U$ goverment isn't ever going to do much about it.  MS has an
incredible marketing department[1], and they also fit my criteria for a
large-cap stock; and even if they do lose the 'OS' battle, it won't
happen for awhile, and it would be nearly trivial for Microsoft to move
their various application suites to Linux, BSD, OSX, or whatever have
you.

Any thoughts, ideas, comments?  Keep in mind that I am a die-hard Linux
geek; all of my systems run Linux, and I don't buy hardware unless it's
Linux supported.  I'm also an investing geek, however, and I hate to
admit that MSFT looks like a fairly decent buy.

[1] I know, I know, sales scum and all, but credit where it is due: the
    MS marketing guys have been *very* effective at their jobs.

-- 
Don Werve <donw@examen.com> (Unix System Administrator)

Yorn desh born, der ritt de gitt der gue,
Orn desh, dee born desh, de umn bork! bork! bork!