Re: Some interesting economic facts

["Norm" <normanmo@clark.net>]

On Wed, 22 Apr 1998 23:39:01 -0400 (EDT), Mitch Stone wrote:

>
>Microsoft has a huge incentive to obsolete its own products in order to 
>keep us on the forced upgrade path, because in reality, the marginal 
>value added of one version of Word over the previous version is 
>essentially nil (and arguably negative!), and the price should begin to 
>reflect this. They have the perfect vehicle for maintaining this forced 
>march via the operating system tyranny and the OEM lock-in.


     And this will get even worse if M$ ever succeeds in getting the
hardware manufacturers to follow their 'PC specs'.  If this happens
they will no longer need to use hype and the promise of additional
features to try to create a need for users to upgrade, they'd be in a
position to just 'tweak' the specs to make earlier versions choke.  If
M$ is allowed to dictate PC hardware specs the game is over, hardware
control is the final key to locking up the entire industry as tight as
a drum.

 ...Cheers,

 ...Norm

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