Re: Thinking Clearly

"Don" wrote :
"I.P. Nichols" wrote:

I don't buy conspiracy theories so I'm having trouble understanding why
MS would spend $billions on .NET just because they have some perversion
about how advantageous it would be to dump Win32.

The reality is that their revenue stream for upgrades declined when Win2K
became mostly stable and WinXP didn't live up to early expectations. .Net
was one of the mechanisms to get everyone back onto the upgrade treadmill.
EOL'ing Win2k was another. Now the same is happening for Win XP SP1 on
October 10, 2006.

Hey, each to his own but I don't see .NET the same way as you do. As for the
"upgrade treadmill" what would you have them do, never upgrade their OS and
only support DOS? I'll loan you my set of DOS 6.2 setup floppies if you
really feel like getting off the dreaded MS treadmill. ;-)

I don't see it as a conspiracy. But I do consider it to be a strong-arm
marketing tactic. Just keep upgrading your OS and apps... they'll keep
feeding you the tools that make it necessary.

As for strong-arm marketing tactics what company doesn't want to control as
much of the market as they can and like Microsoft has done on occassion,
often skate over the edge.

MS doesn't hate Win32... but it does love locking you into new
technologies that are only available in their latest (and currently
supported) product releases.

With past versions of .NET they span a reasonable number of their "out of
support" versions of Windows. However WinFX (Net 3.0) will only be available
on Win-XP, Win-2K3 and Vista which seems reasonable to me considering the
complexity and hardware requirements.

Every company loves to lock you into their own unique products, just think
about how difficult for those folks who have a huge investment in their vast
libraries of Delphi code if they ever desire to move away from Delphi - call
it what you may, in my book that's product lock-in. Also don't forget that
Delphi is upgraded on a almost yearly cycle at somewhat more cost that a
Windows upgrade, yet Delphi's product lock-in and yearly upgrades hasn't
proven to be so attractive that Borland wants to retain ownership of the
product line. Go figure...



.

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