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Microsoft Revenue Up, Tries to Hook Third World
rocketjam writes "Microsoft reported record revenue for the last quarter Thursday due to increased sales of personal computers. Analysts were impressed with the company's overall performance, however they expressed concern about the continuing drop in unearned revenue, reflecting Microsoft's difficulty in signing up customers for long-term, sustainable business contracts. The $400 million drop in unearned revenue was less than the drop in the last quarter but still exceeded many analyst's expectations. The company's continuing problem in gaining long-term contracts is generally attributed to growing security concerns among customers and company's unwillingness to go along with Microsoft's 'Software Assurance' upgrade subscription plan." Also in the news: Microsoft is donating a pile of software to the United Nations -- retail value, $1 billion; wholesale value, maybe $1 million or so -- attempting to hook the Third World on Microsoft software.
third world markets have very limited economies and are more open to alternative (read: kazaa) solutions, I can't see Microsoft ever making any significant profit there. If anything, they'll loose money faster than they'll gain it.
In my experience, you don't (usually) get legally bound to Microtwonk Software, you usually get locked into it by some critical peripheral software -
Translation: Linux still has shitty driver support.
And people like you blame it on Microsoft.
What a hoot.
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slowly replacing the ones spawned during the Windows 9x days.
As an aside: I remember the old days, when new Linux-users often acted like a dog that had gotten out of it's yard for the first time. "I'm freeeeeee" etc. etc. Until they wandered out into the 'road' of some cracker getting root on their box. (Slackware, for instance, didn't assign a root password in the install script, or warn the user in any way they should, until version 4.0). Whomp! Just like the doggie.
These days people get just as chained to big bloated forced-hardware-upgrade loops, re: KDE and Gnome. And the din about BSOD and 'machine locked up' has faded because Microsoft's software has gotten better. Only the weird old fart who hasn't used a Microsoft product since Windows 95 carries on about that anymore.
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