The Microsoft Office suite is one thing M$ does that is done well at least for the average persons needs. I use excel quite a bit in the finance industry, and one of its mail advantages are the wealth of plug-ins for excel: Turboexcel, Mathematica add-in, ODBC connectivity, to name a few very powerful add-ins. The macro recorder and VBA structure is also extremely useful. - Certainly, Office could be drastically improved. One such way to do so would be to make a version that runs on Linux.
When (I refuse to say if ever) might I expect to be able to use M$ Office suite on Linux? You already make one for Mac, so it cant be question of yielding OS market share. It would also give M$ a chance to make some money from Linux users. When? When can we have it?
Corporations' sole responsibility is to increase the wealth of the shareholders. Given, therefore, any aspect of their organisation which is underperforming and not contributing optimally to the bottom line, it should be cut. While this is not great for the European workers, this frees them up to contribute more effectively to some other aspect of the economy. How much money IBM makes as an entire multinational corporation is irrelevant. It is not the stockholders jobs to subsidise European laziness. Personally I appreciate European laziness, but it must come at a price given a competitive world market where 2/3 or the world lives on less than $2/day.
Striking workers are highly inefficient and given that European workers are prone to strike, this should contribute even more to disinvestment in the European labour market.
I love Europe and I know that I would love to live and own property in Europe, but owning a business in Western Europe: I do not think so. India, China and Tax Free zones are much more preferable.
Well, my favourite radio show is Dr. Michio Kaku's Explorations which is a weekly one hour science show also discussing science in politics. This show is of the highest quality.
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/archives.php?id=33
That's the url for the archived programmes back to Oct. By the way, everything else on KPFA should be good albeit heavily biased towards the extreme left. Explorations is all I regularly listen to though since I am into the science tech more than anything else.
If you study the economics of monopoly behaviour, then you know that firms set prices and output based on the demand for their product and the marginal cost of producing that product in order to maximise profits. Since I doubt the marginal cost of printing a CD, a box, and a manual has changed, then the price hike can only be attributed to a change in the demand of microsoft's products. Fixed costs such as lawsuit payoffs do not enter the pricing formula unless they raise the expected future cost of lawsuits as an increasing function of units sold. That could be, but I doubt it. For sure, Microsoft has always been maximising its profits and continues to do so. The price hike is completely unrelated therefore to paying for the fixed cost of the lawsuit.
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The Microsoft Office suite is one thing M$ does that is done well at least for the average persons needs. I use excel quite a bit in the finance industry, and one of its mail advantages are the wealth of plug-ins for excel: Turboexcel, Mathematica add-in, ODBC connectivity, to name a few very powerful add-ins. The macro recorder and VBA structure is also extremely useful. - Certainly, Office could be drastically improved. One such way to do so would be to make a version that runs on Linux.
When (I refuse to say if ever) might I expect to be able to use M$ Office suite on Linux? You already make one for Mac, so it cant be question of yielding OS market share. It would also give M$ a chance to make some money from Linux users. When? When can we have it?
Corporations' sole responsibility is to increase the wealth of the shareholders. Given, therefore, any aspect of their organisation which is underperforming and not contributing optimally to the bottom line, it should be cut. While this is not great for the European workers, this frees them up to contribute more effectively to some other aspect of the economy. How much money IBM makes as an entire multinational corporation is irrelevant. It is not the stockholders jobs to subsidise European laziness. Personally I appreciate European laziness, but it must come at a price given a competitive world market where 2/3 or the world lives on less than $2/day. Striking workers are highly inefficient and given that European workers are prone to strike, this should contribute even more to disinvestment in the European labour market. I love Europe and I know that I would love to live and own property in Europe, but owning a business in Western Europe: I do not think so. India, China and Tax Free zones are much more preferable.
I dont know how this got by the moderators, but this story is nothing but pollution of /. Just like the holocaust - NEVER AGAIN!!!
Well, my favourite radio show is Dr. Michio Kaku's Explorations which is a weekly one hour science show also discussing science in politics. This show is of the highest quality. http://www.kpfa.org/archives/archives.php?id=33 That's the url for the archived programmes back to Oct. By the way, everything else on KPFA should be good albeit heavily biased towards the extreme left. Explorations is all I regularly listen to though since I am into the science tech more than anything else.
If you study the economics of monopoly behaviour, then you know that firms set prices and output based on the demand for their product and the marginal cost of producing that product in order to maximise profits. Since I doubt the marginal cost of printing a CD, a box, and a manual has changed, then the price hike can only be attributed to a change in the demand of microsoft's products. Fixed costs such as lawsuit payoffs do not enter the pricing formula unless they raise the expected future cost of lawsuits as an increasing function of units sold. That could be, but I doubt it. For sure, Microsoft has always been maximising its profits and continues to do so. The price hike is completely unrelated therefore to paying for the fixed cost of the lawsuit.