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

Ami for free. Oly immense loyalty to a product at the end user level prevents
corporations from using their buying power to force a cheap site license.
When the US Goverment DOD moves software procurement to a separate contract,
the price per user of software will end up around 0. Why shouldn't some small
organization price their product at say $1M for the entire US Government for
all time? We would if we were small and hungry. Fortunately most organizations
don't force cheap software on their end users.

Another price concern that I have is that companies will eventually equip
all the employees that need software with a full complement of packages,
and our only revenue opportunity will be upgrades or ephermeral information.
although this problem is over five years away, I think it is important to
keep in mind.

Summary
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Readers of this memo may feel that I have give applications too little air
time. I don't mean to downplay their importance at all. Applications have
been the primary engine of growth (especially in International) over the past
two years. Although Windows' success is necessary for Microsoft applications
to succeed is not sufficient. Other ISVs will be there early with good
applications fully exploiting the environment (Notes, Ami, Designer), so
exploitation is only half of the job. The need to "reinvent" categories and
the way they relate to each other is crucial for all of our applications. I
will be writing up some of my ideas for big changes in applications.

The simplest summary is to repeat our strategy in its simplest form --
"Windows -- one evolving architecture, a couple of implementations and a
immense number of great applications from Microsoft and others." The
evolution refers to the additon of pen, audio, multimedia, networking,
macro language, 32-bit, advanced graphics, setup, a better file system,
and a lot of usability. The "a couple of implementations" is a somewhat
humorous reference to the fact that our NT based versions and our non-NT
versions have a different code in a number of areas to allow us to have both
the advanced features we want and be fairly small on the Intel architecture.
Eventually we will get back t one implementation but it will take four years
before we use NT for everything. I would not use this simple summary for
outside consumption -- there it would be more like "Windows -- one evolving
architecture with hardware freedom for all users and freedom to chose amongst
the largest set of applications."

Although the challenges should make us quite humble about the years to come
I think our position (best sofware company setting many desktop
"standards") is an enviable one and our people are the best. The opportunity
for us if we execute this strategy is incredible.



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