From: sichermn@csulb.edu (Jeff Sicherman)
Subject: Re: FCC will proclaim Microsoft is run by Communists! :)
Organization: Cal State Long Beach
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 18:44:28 GMT

In article <28DEC199210514690@moose.cccs.umn.edu> rwh@moose.cccs.umn.edu writes:
>In article <Bzu31K.522@csulb.edu>, sichermn@csulb.edu (Jeff Sicherman) writes:
>> In article <1992Dec24.160351.2557@tc.cornell.edu> bai@msiadmin.cit.cornell.edu (Dov Bai-MSI Visitor) writes:
>> >From a previous post by Jeff Sicherman:
>> >
>> >>  Oh, I think there will still be plenty of opportunities for Billy boy if
>> >>he works at it. However, it may put a crimp in his megalomania. And I fail
>> >>to see why we have to tailor the marketplace for the most extreme desires
>> >>of entreprenuers if that results in being to corruption of the market and
>> >>the detriment of consumers.
>> >
>> >You asked what may happen as a result of FTC actions and I gave
>> >you my answer. Read some books about successful entrepeneurs if you
>> >don't believe me.
>>  
>>   Charles Keating was a very successful entrepeneur until they caught up with
>> his business practices. 
>
>Nonsense!  Keating got caught because he went broke, NOT because what he
>was doing was illegal.  In fact most of the charges against him were for
>actions he took to hide the fact that he had driven Lincoln into the ground.

   He may have gotten caught (up with) because his scams finally failed to
cover up what he was doing but even that theory is questionable. The
regulators were looking skeptically at him well before but were waived off
by interfering politicians. In any case, he was engaged in fraudulent (and
therefore illegal) transactions that belied his *image* as a successful
entrepeneur.

>>   And again I ask, just where has MS been an innovator ?
>
>You want to measure MS against an engineering scale rather than a business
>scale.  In the overall history of business you'll be hard pressed to find
>another example of a company that was able to grow as quickly as MS and
>still remain solvent.  In the last decade, they've gone from being nothing
>to being in the Fortune 50 and they've shown almost no public symptoms of
>growing pains.  In the religion of business that is a task that is nothing
>short of being a miracle.  How many of the old CP/M crowd was able to handle
>even a small piece of success?  Osborne? DR? Software Arts?  The only company
>that I can think of that comes close is Compaq, and they seem to be suffering
>the consequences of a certain amount of detachment from the end-user.  
>
>A recent New York Times article profiled the MS employees with the astonishing
>statistic that everyone who has worked at MS for more than 3 years is worth
>more than $1,000,000 based on their stock options.  If I was worth more than
>1M, I sure wouldn't be working, so they must like it at MS.
>
>Two weeks ago the NYT reviewed the user laboratory implimented by MS to study
>how people actually use their software.  The article pointed out that among
>Lotus, Borland, WP Corp, etc., MS was the only organization to have a 
>noticable in-house product evaluation group.  Quite correctly, I think, they
>compared it to the broadbased human engineering effort pioneered at Bell
>Labs.  Studying how people use your software may not seem particularly
>innovative, but it seems to have escaped the most of the competition. 
>
>How long before we start hearing cries that Word or Excel is too easy to
>use and should be crippled so that Borland or Lotus can compete?

  All this is very interesting and there's no question that MS is a very
successful and well-run company. Off course that's easier to do when one
is in a booming market and on holds a virtual monopoly on an essential
component of the market, but I agree that it's well run even independent
of that. Of course it took years and years to get a decent Windows out ...

   However, the question was in response to referring to MS as an
'innovator' and I asked where and when did it fulfill this charaacterization.
You have done nothing to answer that.

-- 
Jeff Sicherman
up the net without a .sig
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy