"Read their financial statements carefully and then get back to me. "
Oh do you mean the zero debt, tons of cash lying around? Or the fact that MS makes more in investments than actual operations?
Well DUHHH, it's a monopoly. But let's look at the fact that MS has lost money in everything besides Windows and MS Office. A LOT of money. All of that everything else, they actually had competitors (wow, smth so rare in corporate USA). Or maybe, lets take a look at their outstanding lawsuits that they constantly have to pay off and the many more to come.
This company would have more success just becoming a bank.
"Yes linux is a threat, not a business killer."
No except that it came out of nowhere, is starting to dominate servers and large corporate mainframes and is slowly seeping into home desktops. I doubt you even have a clue how superior Linux is in everyway to Windows. BTW, young kids and teenagers that get interested in PCs use Linux, not Windows. These are the next generation if you do not get it. In other words, as the population becomes more and more computer literate, Windows platform is going out the window.
"If you know what you are doing then their products work exceedingly well and are very reliable in their current incarnations."
Quite the opposite. WIndows is meant for the average moron. If you actually understand PCs, you realize how crappy MS products are. It's obvious to me you do not really comprehend computers.
"The problem is that there are many people who claim the expertise in their product lines but in fact are far from expert: this is a problem Microsoft has yet to admit or address."
Wrong again. Read the article. MS products are aimed to require less experienced staff. It's part of their marketing pitch. This occurs at my workplace by far. When I read what he had to say, it all made sense why idiots at my bank can be tech support admins. But wait, they are MS NT certified.
If you talk to any real programmer or computer science Ph.D, these people do not even touch MS products unless they have to or unless they need to do some dumbed down function like typing a quick letter.
Do you know what an expert would does if he was to supervise an MS NT server? He hires a bunch of low paid morons to do the idiotic maintenance work because that's all you can really do.
"Their products are not as cheap to administer as they claim"
Their products are the most expensive to administer and this new License 6 will let MS rape the businesses but make it sound like they are getting a great deal.
So you basically get an inferior product that is much more expensive. Does that at all make any sense to you?
"and expert software developers are rare:"
I can find you 10 expert self-taught software developers within minutes just through MiRC.
You do not know what you are talking about. All software experts I know do firm-specific software development. Most are actually unemployed right now. They are not rare at all and this is just USA we are talking about. I can go to Moscow and find a top level programming team within weeks.
"there are however many low paid people at many companies that MS claims can write high quality high performance applications for their platform: that is a lie. Again, their systems are more complicated and require more expertise than they are willing to admit. Thus their products are not really less expensive platforms upon which to develop applications - unless they are simple and rely on out of the box "wizard" functionality."
Ok now you basically supported what the article had said. MS products are more complicated in fact, because they are so badly done and written. Running a Linux based business requires high skill level. Running an MS based business requires a much less skill level, but tons of maintenance and work because even MS themselves cannot fix the Piece of Shit products they make.
Look, take a rotten old boat and a brand new one. You can spend all the work you can to patch up the old boat, but it will never be as good as the new one. So for all the work and maintenance, you still get worse performance
Thats the situation with MS vs a real piece of software.
"Perform a detailed analysis of financial statements of Oracle, Sun, Hp, Microsoft, IBM and then come back with an informed opinion ...."
Here is factual information you cannot realize. MS IS A MONOPOLY. Do you know what business risk that involves? Practically none. Only risk is legal and we all know how that turned out.
How can you even compare real companies that run a real business that actually requires competition versus a law breaking scumbag monopoly.
You know what why don't you analyze how the Xbox operation has performed so far. That is a perfect example how Microsoft really operates in a real competitive environment. Actually every single venture of MS has been a pathetic failure because this company does not know how to compete. If the latest move with their rape of a License agreement and .NET does not succeed (probably won't), you can expect the same type of a real competitive environment. If all the stock options are cashed out, who knows where MS will be. Not saying they are going away, but they simply have nothing to truly compete with besides their balance sheet and enslaving license terms.
You know, in the case of the Carnegie monopoly, at least he was involved with a simple commodity, so if ever his monopoly was broken, there was still a simple product to sell that was hard to differentiate from the others. MS makes a horrible and inferior product and if their monopoly is ever truly broken and all their slaves...oops I meant clients basically started to shop around, MS as a software company would be gone.
