And I'll add, that if I'm right, then I will have to compete with them. So not only must my wages be inline, but also my other costs. Think Google, the majority of their costs are people lately, they use Linux because they were poor students.
Must be 10 years or more ago that I last used Magic. Now that was before Java and Linux had become a common knowledge. (I personally had not heard the word Java at the time and Linux was still only two years old and running on a 386 40 Mhz with 4Mb RAM) I built in one week an application (help desk) that took 15 man years to do in Micro$hit. So don't give me the crap that .Net is something new or wonderfull or whatever. Maria
MSFT has grown revenue by an average annual rate of 8.7% over the past five years. They pulled in 39.8 billion in `05, 37 billion in `04 and 32 billion in `03. Rather than drying up and blowing away, they are making money faster than ever. Not sure how you guys can trade when you form such strong opinions about companies.
So have I .. and on MySQL Informix, DB2. There is no "best" database server... they each have their strengths and weaknesses but through a wide range of applications they are dialtone - commodity. ... And I might add that the feature set you get with Oracle can be duplicated if you a bit clever - read have good engineers. $oracle is the most expensice solution (in general) and if a company wants to throw their money away thats their business ... at least until their board gets wind of it and starts asking questions on the audit committee.
There is a catalyst: its called crtical mass and the Linux LAMP stack is IMHO just about there. I was there at the beginning my friend - working with $soft, dec, IBM etc ..... $soft took off largely through word of mouth and the cooperation of the developer community. They have lost the developer community at this point and thus have lost much of their free marketing power and thr good will of many decision makers.
and neither did $soft, and they took away market from IBM and DEC. Some of the smartest people i know no longer work at Microsoft and that I think is a big problem for the company going forward.......
Didn't say they wern't growing, just that their monopolistic practices are losing their effectiveness and this will weigh in on their growth. With real competition they will be forced to lower their price points and licensing structures on just about everything as the competition heats up. They are already viewed in the developer community as yesterdays news ...
Well, if the USD is dropping in value and the price in Euros stays the same then their revenue in dollars looks to go up but in fact is going down. Figures are there to be manipulated. As Micro$hit already acknowledged Linux is a threat to them . M$ had to do big concessions in Thailand where they have now made a local version of their software availoble at great discounts becasue the government was commissioning PC's with Linux. Now that the market with PC's looks to become more saturated and the prices of hardware finally is starting to go down to a more realistic level we will see a shakeout in software. It won't be too long before the masses will refuse to pay a 30% or more tax to M$. (or cannot afford with the way the economy looks to be going). 8.7% and you call that wonderfull? LOL, that is a far cry from its heydays, it is another confirmation that they are slowing down. Maria
Money doesn't necesarily follow the leaders ..... and poor management is all over the technology business .....
I have worked for one of the big 5 accounting companies when they decided that they wanted a piece of the IT consulting business. Unfortunately the consultants seem to be more of the category "bullshit artists" than real competent specialists. "Shooting the messenger" was more common than taking notice of the message itself. Have been fired for "being undiplomatic" where the message that I was trying to convey at the time turned later to be 100% correct. I was just 10 month earlier than that the masses came to the discovery that it wasn't going to work. And that, my friends, is today's problem. Those who have the "gift of the gap" (can talked the smoothest) seem to rise to the top without ever producing one iota of substance. I am glad I am able to carve out a living without having to put up with those - fill in the blank -. Maria