"Bill Gates - Challenges & Strategy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gates Bill)

recognized.

PATENTS: If people had understood how patents would be granted when most
of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry
would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large
company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation,
algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this
company has no need of any of our patents then the have a 17-year right to take
as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges
with large companies and patenting as much as we can. Amazingly we havn't
done any patent exchanges tha I am aware of. Amazingly we havn't found a
way to use our licensing position to avoid having our own customers cause
patent problems for us. I know these aren't simply problems but they deserve
more effort by both Legal and other groups. For example we need to do a
patent exchange with HP as part of our new relationship. In many application
categories straighforward thinking ahead allows you to come up with
patentable ideas. A recent paper from the League for Programming Freedom
(available from the Legal department) explains some problems with the
way patents are applied to software.

RIGIDITY/PRICING: In the Autodesk memo, Walker talks about the short term
thinking that high profitability can generate. He cites specific examples
such as a very conservative approach to giving out free software or a desire
to maintain fixed percentages for the wrong reasons. Microsoft priced DOS
even lower than we do today to help it get established. I wonder if we would
be as aggressive today. This is not a simplistic advocacy for just lowering
our prices -- our prices in the US are about where they should be. However
the price of success is that people fail to allow the kind of investments
that will lead to incredible profits in the future. For example we have
gotten away without funding any internal or external research. Nathan is
working with me to put together a lan that will end up costing $10M
per year about two years from now. I have no plan to reduce our spending
in some other category by $10M. Microsoft is good at investing in new
subsidaries and even at investing in new products (database, mail, BBU,
networking). Most of our rigidity comes when we have a very profitable
product and when the market changes. In these circumstances we should
spend more or charge less, but our systems locks us into staying the same and
losing share.

My largest concern about price comes from Borland. Organizations smaller than
Borland will not have enough presence or credibility to use low price against
us broadly I think 90% of the significant competition we will face in
productivity applications will come from Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland, Claris
and IBM barring technical innovations by small companies. It is amazing how
similar the applications strategies of Microsoft, Lotus, Borland and Claris
are. Philippe has a much lower cost structure than Lotus, IBM or Microsoft,
so he can afford to do things we would consider wild. For example Borland
is considering not offering their Windows word processor separately but
integrating it with Quattro for free -- the technical opportunity and value
would be very strong. This is very different than Lotus temporarily offering