Slashdot Mirror
UK's Biggest Supermarket Challenges Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "The UK's equivalent of Walmart is taking on Microsoft in the software game. Tesco is famous for it's cheap 'value' food, but it's now offering 'value' alternatives to Microsoft's biggest products. From the article: 'Now, when you traverse the aisles in search of baked beans, sanitary towels and two-for-one packs of raw mince (hamburger), you can grab yourself a copy of Tesco Office (£20) — an alternative to the almost de-facto standard that is Microsoft Office — or Tesco Antivirus (£10), which is designed to keep your PC free of malware.' Tesco apparently 'takes one in every eight pounds spent in the UK'."
I agree with you and think the company should offer whatever product it thinks will increase its customer base and profits. However it is a common phenomenon for large companies to have more money than they know what to do with. Investors only rarely get their money back in this way. In the early 80's companies figured out that people had stopped investing in companies and started trading stocks. This means people made money of the stock price not the actual return on investment so dividends dried up and the culture of short term gain for stock price goodness was born. Happily the dot com crash did bring the "investor" back into vogue and companies are starting to rediscover the wisdom of the build a strong business that returns its profits to investors strategy. If this continues we should see a decrease in market volitility in exchange for dividends being brought back and licked to actual profitablilty.
Anyway back to the point. Very large profitable companies (we should all have this problem) sometimes make more money than they have ideas to spend it on. Different companies handle this differently Wal Mart, Microsoft and the oil companies tend to store massive cash reserves and keep doing business as usual contributing to the stagnation of the economy. More resposable companies hire better management with new ideas and some companies like Google just throw money at every crazy Idea they can until something sticks and makes more money.
SO after that rambeling mess it currently is not popular to return money to investors and soemtimes it is just hard to spend the huge wave of cash that some large succesful businesses generate.
Although if they wish to remain on top they will need to distribute the money in reserve properly. Since this is Slashdot I should mention perhaps Microsoft should have spent a little more of that massive reserve on making Vista not suck.