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MS doesn't crush competition by offering superior products

I caan't think of a single example of MS crushing competition by producing a superior product, certainly not in the ten years I've been using MS products. In all cases that I'm aware of, MS crushed the competition through temporary low prices, temporary attractive licensing deals for corporate users, and bundling. Only sometime after the competition has been crushed and can no longer afford to maintain their technological lead does MS catch up with and occasionally surpass the competition in quality and/or features.

The obvious example is IE, which won market share through being bundled with MS Windows and being free, not through superiority to Netscape. It wasn't until at least version 4 that IE began to catch up with Netscape technologically, and even though an open source project, Mozilla has once again surpassed IE, with MS only recently announcing that a future version of IE will have several features available in Mozilla and other browsers for some time.
Another example is MS Office. Ten years ago, many people believed the WordPerfect Office suite was superior, but MS offered corporate users a network license that was cheaper than per seat licenses and offered deals to most large PC manufacturers to have MS Office bundled with all new PCs. After destroying all competition through these techniques, the network licenses were discontinued and the bundling deals were modified. Only then did MS worry about improving MS Office to overtake the competition on quality and features.
This is the reason that MS will never be able to crush Linux and other Open Source products. Since there is no company behind them to crush and the purchase price can't be beat, prior strategies won't work and newer strategies don't seem to work any better.

Posted by: criderja   Posted on: 01/29/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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