[Ti] [OT] Micro$oft acquires Virtual PC

[Chris Olson]

On Friday, February 21, 2003, at 07:14 AM, <webb3201 at airmail.net> wrote:

> The acquisition of VPC is geared to help Msoft gain more control in the
> enterprise space and combat Sun, Linux, and other competition for the
> server market

Exactly - not so much Sun, but Linux is the real threat to Microsoft's 
market share.

> In reality, Apple is not a company that Msoft is too concerned with.  
> If
> they wanted to kill Apple, it would be much easier to close the 
> internal
> Apple development teams and quit offering Office and IE for Mac.  That
> would kill many of the new switchers.

Who ever thought up this line that Apple needs Microsoft holding it' s 
hand to survive?  Do you know what the single most popular 
macupdate.com office download was last week for OS X users?  
OpenOffice.org.  110,476 downloads.  Microsoft is probably lucky if 
they sold 100 copies of Office X over the same time period.  The 
switchers could care less about Microsoft's products for Mac.

And that's not to downplay Microsoft's efforts for the Macintosh 
platform.  I have a close friend who works for the Mac Unit at Redmond, 
and those people in that department are *fiercely* loyal to the Mac, 
and dedicated to developing top notch software for it.  It's no 
surprise that Office X beats Office XP hands down.  It's the price that 
is the deciding factor for most Mac users.

> Microsoft needs Apple to survive as an example of the fact Msoft is 
> not a
> monopoly.

Both Apple and Microsoft are monopolies.
--
Chris Olson
Network Administrator
AST Communications,  Inc.
Barron,  WI   USA