[vox] OT: Contemplating the unthinkable...

[vox@lists.lugod.org]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2003 at 12:38:30PM -0800, Rod Roark wrote:
> This is all stuff that the market knows about, and is
> reflected in the current price of the stock.

Of course; this is one the reasons why I'm 'considering' it, rather than
having done it. ;)  I try to look a few years down the road, rather than
looking at results for the next quarter.

I also have a rule about not investing in a company which I would hesitate
to do business with, and I certainly would put MS in the last place when
it comes to choosing vendors.

> You want to make buy/sell decisions based on information
> that is NOT widely understood.  Like perhaps your personal
> perception of the improving viability of Linux on the
> desktop.  MS has leveraged its desktop monopoly to achieve
> much of its past success; if that is threatened, you will
> not want to be holding MSFT shares.

That was the point in my last paragraph -- sure, their desktop monopoly
gave them the ability to essentailly own the deskop office application
market, but is it also not quite possible, should Linux start to really 
win the so-called desktop war, that Microsoft couldn't just as easily
move their software over to the Linux platform?  They don't need to
worry about gaining mindshare this time around, as they've already got
it, so the lack of a monopoly wouldn't hurt them too much, as long as
they paid attention to user needs.

Corporate America would jump at the chance to run native copies of 
Microsoft Office, Exchange, and the like on Linux machines, to my way of
thinking.  I certainly wouldn't, but I'm not a McBusinessSchoolGraduate
type of guy.

On the flip side, OpenOffice.org is making some incredible strides, and
is very close to passing MS Office up in terms of usability and useful
features.  All they need to do is improve the OOo database interaction,
fix some of the multi-language quirks, add in a grammar checker (that's
a big one), and get some better support for collaborative documentation.

OOo also has features that I doubt MS software ever will; the
human-readable files which OOo spits out are great for any type of
automatic document generation and processing, the PDF feature is
incredibly useful, and StarBasic is free from many of the quirks that
enable Office macro viruses to propagate.

*sigh*  Maybe I'll just invest in Enron instead...*grin*

-- 
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!