The fall of MS
OfflineSomeone in LinuxToday comments suggested that Microsoft has so much cash that it could burn through it for years without going bankrupt, basically forcing the market to their way with their money. We heard that before.
But here's a comment that nicely explains how this isn't exactly so and that in fact MS is in a quite bad position right now, at this time of Vista release:
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2007-01-27-002-26-OP-MS-LL-0008
The fact that they are publicly traded company with a responsibility to shareholders is what makes the above luxury impossible. As soon as they start slipping profits, they will be slipping too fast for them to remain where they are.
But that's heard before as well (even here on Libervis). That comment is a nice read though, as it nicely describes the *current* situation.
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MS is such a giant it'll take a lot to kill it. Indeed they have a huge bank balance, but their sharholders will get mightly pissed off if decades of profit are used to keep it afloat and will jump ship. But it'll take a long time imho to get to this state as they have fingers is so many tech pies - if their OS business fails they can still make Office suites and XBoxes...
Anyway, it'll happen some day, but I don't see that day soon.
dylunio
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That's probably quite true. To be honest, I expect them to turn into what IBM is today, still a giant but a reformed one, with the old generation gone and replaced with forward thinking people willing to even embrace Free Software. This reform would probably come just about the time the MS realizes it is dying off into irrelevance or that it could be dying off soon.
It could also happen some time after Bill Gates completely retreats and Steve Ballmer is replaced by a new CEO.
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Hmm, becomming like IBM would be interesting. Though in a way I'd prefer them turning into SCO, which is dying a slow death (but that may be my sadistic mind). Indeed it'll be interesting once Bill and Ballmer have gone on to other things, one day MS might be deemed 'good guys'.
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Well I wouldn't mind them turning into an SCO either. Considering the heritage it'd be well deserved and if SCO had to go away, it seems only fitting for MS to pay a similar price, unless of course they really do change into a corporation that starts doing a lot of good for the world.
To be fair, there may be *some* things MS did that were good, but unfortunately I think most of them were probably side effects or brief moments of true innovation and enlightenment by certain people working for Microsoft. Unfortunately the whole that MS makes up constitutes what people dub as an "evil empire", a monopoly machine.
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