🚀 go-pugleaf

In <3891a604_4@news3.prserv.net>, "J. Clarke" <nospam@nospam.nospam> writes:
>"Pete Tisserand" <NoSpamMan@byproduct.org> wrote in message
>news:ydhuvIyNtV5F-pn2-2deo8Z7dWvrd@ppp11.blackbox1-mfs.netaxs.com...
>
>> One only has to look at the netscape/explorer debacle to see where MS
>> is going. Do they think MS will happily leave them alone?
>
>Depends on what they are doing.  If Microsoft percieves something as a
>mainstream market, something that the majority of computers are going to
>have installed in one form or another, then they'll go after it.  If it's a
>niche market, they tend to leave it alone.  That's why they have a word
>processor but not a page composition program (don't say Publisher--it's a
>toy) or a font generator or a video editor or a Modula compiler or an APL
>interpreter or a CAD program.  Microsoft can't do everything at once--they
>go after what they percieve as the high-profit targets.  If someone uncovers
>a new major market then Microsoft will likely try to tap it, but they won't
>know it's a major market until whoever discovered it has sold enough into it
>to identify it as such, at which point that company has made a good pile for
>its investors.
>

interesting that you would point out the CAD market . . . MS certainly
has all the players in the midrange CAD market fairly well locked in. 
Varimetrix is the only professional-level lower-priced CAD program 
available on anything but NT . . . the good part is that M$ is making
pretty serious efforts to get into the machine controller business, but
as usual their products are so poor they're liable to come a cropper.
A blue screen of death is one thing on your desktop, quite another
hooked to 60 hp shoving several hundred pounds of steel around at
1200 inches per minute. After they kill a few people they may decide 
that wasn't such a great market after all. Software engineers outside
the industry are notoriously ignorant of what the consequences of
poor programming can be. 
 

>--- John
>

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