Add Insult to Injury...Star Office on Win XP

[Oldbugger]

As a bit of a test I installed Star Office 5.2 on a WinXP partition...beautiful....turned the XP desktop into a web page with all the Star Office stuff available under the file menu....very elegant....a lot easier than using the stock WinXP interface........just a bit of fun....

And as a reverse....there is an article on Linux.org which tals about most of the MS Office 2000 progs running, actually running, under linux.....hmmmmm

Things really are getting pretty interchangeable.

If I were Billy Gates I would be selling a few more of his shares (he sold $US 1.2Billion worth this year). There is this article at TheRegister which shows where M$ are heading...software subscriptions .....their activation process is apart of it as were we in Aus a while ago..guinea pigs we were.......http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/24780.html

interesting stuff

[SegiY]

You have to admit that it's going to take a pretty big effort for someone else to provide substansual competition against microsoft, i think bill is safe, and if he wasn't he would have enough stashed away anyway.

[JediAgent]

Rick people don't just "get by" on stashed funds. Bill Gates is a smart man who prolly has money other places than Microsoft, prolly even other places than the PC industry. BUT if he did lose a considerable amount of welth (more than 50%) it would be newsworthy how exactly he could keep his lifestyle. Rich people get used to being rich, and any loss in personal value does hurt, regardless of how many billions he's worth. I think if for some reason Windows went out completely as a widely used OS, and Microsoft went under (which it wouldn't based only on a loss of Windows) we'd see Bill's name in another Industry within 5 years. He's an entreprenuer now, not a DOS programmer anymore.

[Frost]

Read an article in "MONEY" magazine about Bill Gates, but mostly Microsoft. MS has over 40 Billion dollars in near term liquid assets.. ie they can convert and stack a pile of doug up amounting to over 40 billion dollars CASH is less than one year. No other company has that kind of liquid assets.. It said he has enough to buy every major baseball, football, basketball, and hockey team in America. Enough to buy 23 space shuttles! Or,all the gold in Fort Knox four times over! Enough to buy the entire airline industry, - twice. More cash than Ford, Exxon/Mobil and WalMart combined.

What are they doing?? investing heavily in video gaming, like Xbox and the like, a $20 Billion a year business in ineractive entertainment. They diversify and have the larges R&D budgets in the country. Growth has slowed, but when you consider that it's harder to increase 40 billion into 2 decimal figures of inerests (11% example), remember that it takes big major moves to generate enough cash to do that. Selling cotton candy at the fair just ain't gonna do it.

Right now they continue to grow at $1 Billion a month.. more than enough to fund their R&D from growth and sales.

People might condemn and belittle Microsoft, but without it, just where would you be in the computing industry today? UNIX? Linux?? It is one thing to make a good operating system that has features, as do Linux and UNIX, along with Microsoft. But when people look at ease of use, and confortability in using, Microsoft has shined brightly in a world of dark shrouded command prompts and command interperters,.. scipt install, and debuggin schemes. I know our secretary at work, has enough problems getting along with her computer (it scares her).. imagine a black screen that code would have to be typed in and run (interpreted)

LINUX and UNIX have great places, and they are making strides at becomming more "user friendly", only to mimic the Windows theme.. I think that's a compliment to MS.

[Mr. C]

Porting applications between OS's is a good thing for user accessability. Some major steps have been made, and I think it is a trend destined to grow.

Personally, I do like Microsoft. Yet at the same time, I am opposed to restrictive licensing techniques. It's not that I'm going to install my copy of Windows on 12 PC's. It's that I don't want to go through the hassle of reregistering when I upgrade my system or format and install. Hence my foray into the open source offerings, I'm not looking to replace Windows ATM but I do want to keep my options open considering the direction things are taking.

As for software subscriptions - that may well work in a corporate setting, providing they even are interested with keeping up with updates to the program.
I just like to get a good program that works well for me, then I'm happy. Operating systems aren't much in themselves. Adding a few applications is what makes it worthwhile to have a PC at all. I would just as soon purchase an application on CD and have it for all time. I don't need any surprises when I need to do something with an app -- as in, you start up your subscribed application and find changes to the interface and function as part of you wonderful subscription package. As a home user, I just ain't into all that hassle.

And of course there is the whole up-and-coming .NET thing going on. I have just one thing at this time to say to that --- "get me some freaking broadband access at an affordable price, and we can talk about it.".

But yeah Frost. Mr. Gates has brought us all a long way to the benefit of all. That benefit extends to the open source community as well. MicroSoft came up with the standards, API's and such that helped so much to bring the personal computer within the realistic budget pricing of the common dweller in an industrialized
nation. You can actually buy an entire system now for what a bit of RAM cost in the not so distant past. Pretty doggone amazing when you stop to think about it!

The bottom line for me is, it's not that I have outgrown MicroSoft, I think in essence indications are that they are outgrowing me.