avocadia have you got a PDF editor?

Hi Kay,

Microsoft (Oracle, and SAP) are facing two types of competition:

1. Large organisations:

Consulting firms (Led by IBM) drive large organisations into translating technology into business processes then outsourcing it/ off shoring back to IBM and others. So call centres, billing, customer centers, and similar business functions will be swallowed by IBM and similar companies causing the traditional software vendors (like microsoft) to miss out on software sales and face a rapidly shrinking market.

2. Small/ medium businesses:
Exactly as David Latimer pointed.
With Google, services for small businesses will be internet based applications (similar to ebay services). In fact most small business collaboration is with ech other and not internal.

Google is positioned itself to be the gateway to internet business applications or in other words, your operating system rather than windows.

All the best

Kenny: Yes, I do. Adobe Acrobat - Acrobat, not Reader. I could also be using OS X which supports PDF natively. There are quite a few tools for PDF editing, free or otherwise.

I remember when big blue (IBM) straddled the globe and the official USgovernment policy, via their anti-trust laws was for any government department to only place up to 80% of their business with IBM.

A less than perfect system but at least something which did recognise the merits of competition.

Poor old Rockafella saw his monopoly broken.
Their was a (I think ) dentist in Cleveland (or somewhere) who supposedly, through his crafty entreprenuerial mechinations ended up with a slice of ever record and entertainment artist until American Music too was broken up.

The US FTC has already had one bite at Microsoft and doubtless will take others.

I tend to have some faith in the atni-trust / antoi monopolies processes. IBM almost collapsed completely and in part due to its agreement with Microsoft and the non-exclusivity of that agreement. Similar events take place and corporate monoliths fall from grace.

Ultimately no company or corporation can strangle its competition. The strain of such efforts results in something always breaking and when it does there is usually a fallout, like Enron, a company which thought it was omnipotent and before them Michael Milken, the junk bond king of the 1980s / early 90s - When all fell apart it was not the end of civilisation as we know it. Fortunately the "capitalist system" is sufficiently resiliant to resist such tremors.

Microsoft is big enough to be a big enough problem for something to break. When it does the "market" will change - maybe for better, maybe not but whilst Microsoft was a fabulous investment in the past it has probably plateaued and has a future a bit like Aussie Telstra - damned for what it does and damned for what it doesn't - either way - a place for investors to be wary of.

The cracks started with Java and the failure of Microsoft to dominate its development, maybe ODF will enhance the strain and we will see Microsoft follow Standard Oil, American Music and IBM. Without wishful thinking, no one anticipated the Collapse of the Berlin Wall either.

I read somewhere that microsoft is going to offer an xml based format for its office files in forthcoming versions of office. The reluctance to use opendocument has probably more to do with the fact that it is inferior and cannot support many of the things that office applications can do.

Microsoft's position in office productivity applications is no more a problem for society than SAP's position in enterprise applications. They have the lead. There are others in the field. It is not unscionable that they have a monopoly.

I think the bigger threat, as someone else has raised, is google in internet search. It is fortunate that there is some competition in this area from yahoo and microsoft. But whoever wins here, may well win in every other area down the track. And this may not "make the world a better place".

A fundamental problem with standards is that nobody writes programs that strictly comply with them. All vendors that say their applications comply are probably right. However, they will all want to make a product differenciator - additional whistles and bells beyond the standard that the standard does not address. So, now what do you have? a product that complies with the basic standard as far as the standard definitionis concerned but additional features that no other product supports.

Therefore what good are the standards if they only address a portion of the various "complying" products functionality.

Witness the UNIX operating system and the Open Systems standards. To name a few, IBM, HP, Sun, all claimed compatibility. Have you ever tried to migrate your applications from one to the other?

By forcing a level of compatibility by government fiat we will see another Telstra that is years behind the technology curve because it is not financialy incented to move forward