> That's because they wanted to milk the last few $$ they might get by spamming
> people in hotmail with "Your space is low!! Pay now to get more space!!!" mails.

But the assholes didn't consider that there are so many choices... I wonder who was so smart to pay for an email with no standard POP3 access and tons of spam.

> If you'll notice, MS's stock has kinda evened out, but they need excuses for
> people to be interested in them financially. Normally a company doesn't last
> longer than 50 years, and 25 years is considered the high point of most
> companies. There's an aweful lot of time until Longhorn comes out, MS needs to
> make some $$ in the meantime somehow.

Of course they cannot expand their OS market further. Everyone at home has Windows, and I doubt that the linux-powered servers going MS are more than the windows server switching to linux. They still have 90% of the market, though, and good part of it won't get lost. Of course they need to innovate: people still running Windows 98/ME (and 2000/XP in a couple of years) are a problem, they give no cash. That's why they tried to drop support for 98 some time ago, and recently I've heard something similar about 2000. Half the world whined and they took a step back, but they will try again soon.

> Investors only get excited about
> investing in a company when there is a lot of money to be made (and MS's recent
> decision to pay out dividends aren't enough). If MS doesn't keep going up up
> then investors will lose interest and MS will start to go down.

It's still a bit hard to believe, but I know it's true.

> This is also why MS is expanding into new markets recently (X-Box, Mobile
> Phones, Tablet PCs, Media PCs, in-car computers, media formats + media players).

That's basically selling a brand, there. And every item you mentioned needs an upgrade sooner or later. The idea is that you buy things that don't last, so you have to buy again. Software is dangerous, because it never grows old in some fashion. People doesn't perceive an upgrade as something new, and is not willing to pay for it. An upgraded Mobile Phone is another object. An upgraded software is a patch on the previous.

> MS has effectively sold their software to anyone who wants it, and they've
> already locked in loyal customers into Licensing 6.0 (which was another
> initiative to get investors excited by having companies pay up front for their
> MS software upgrades for the next few years, giving MS a short burst of money),
> so they have no additional revenue for a while.

Fix it now, be more sorry later. I wonder how much they can keep doing that. Link?

> Right now MS is betting
> everything on Longhorn, their last big chance to build up a lot of revenue.
>
> Until then, they're going to milk their current customers for money.

As you cleverly pointed out in a previous mail about .NET and stuff, the only customers they care about are developers. They are releasing more and more devtools at cheap prices (and even for free for students and such, that's how I got my XP, VS.NET and SQL Server). As long as developers produce Windows software, they are kind of safe. That's why Ballmer dances and shouts at conferences. Fortunately for them, there are no other SDKs as good as theirs at the moment.

I don't care about MS if they go down. They can die. What I care about is: what will we have to cope with. You say: Linux! Ok. Sure. But I use my PC to do something else. With Linux I spend most time so that I *CAN* do something else, which then generally takes less time than fixing the OS to make it possible. This could have been ok 10 years ago, but it's retarded in 2004. And with XP around there is some competition in the user-friendlyness field! If MS goes down, who will be interested in developing an easier way to interact with the PC? No competition, no party. I hope MS stays, and keeps doing crappy stuff and stealing ideas from Apple.