Tresy Kilbourne wrote:
>You, Steve Tomljenovic, wrote:
>
>>The only way big companies survive is that
>>they have three distinct advantages which soley comes from thier size.
>>They can afford the lawyers to defend thier ambigious patents, the
>>control the means of distribution, and they can afford to buy out
>>thier smaller competitors and assimilate thier technology (and
>>developers).
>Can you supply examples of the first two of these practices? Certainly
>the (blocked) Microsoft/Intuit deal is the most well-known among many of
>the last, and I'm not even sure what's wrong with it in the first place,
>outside of antitrust issues of course. The software developer evidently
>decides that selling will earn him/her more money than marketing it
>directly, otherwise the sale wouldn't take place. Am I missing something?

Perhaps what was being bought in the Microsoft/Intuit deal were the
customers of Intuit's product, not the technology. Just as cable
subscribers are worth about $1200 each, Intuit's customers had a price on
their heads too. They would be proven buyers of commodity software, willing
and able to buy Windows and Office.The poor don't run Intuit personal
finance packages, Win95 or WebTV. I think Steve's sentiment is just that --
a sentiment. It's about pushing product into a pipeline.
-- Wat Tyler