Competing With Products and Standards

[Tod Landis <landis@cruzio.com>]

  Just ran across a book that may interest people on
  this list:  Microsoft Secrets by Cusumano and Selby.
  
  It reminded me of something I had forgotten, that
  Microsoft gave away 450,000 copies of
  Word as a way of capturing the word processor
  market (pp 139-140).
  
  Also, there is this gem of a Gates quote on page 157:
  
        Standards increase the basic machine that you
        can sell into [the market] ...  I really shouldn't say
        this, but in some ways, in an individual product
        category, it leads to a natural monopoly...
  
  You couple this with Gates comments about standards
  in The Road Ahead and it is hard not to see things.
  (The Road Ahead is indexed, and there is an entry for
  Standards, Internet that is worth reading)
  
  Tod Landis