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kumarm_arun

Listed below are comments made by kumarm_arun between Wednesday, 23rd April 2008 and Wednesday, 23rd April 2008.

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What does Live Mesh mean? 4:21pm on 23 Apr 2008 Microsoft is a company becoming increasingly irrelevant. Software and operating systems in particular
are in certain aspects significantly different from consumer products like, say, a car. To sell a car, not only that you have to invest long research and development efforts but also have to buy the metals, plastic and lots of other raw materials which go into a car and also have to spend lots of manufacturing efforts to convert these raw materials into a car. Then you have to compete with dozens of other manufacturers to sell it. So the result is that the manufacturers really put in an earnest effort to add good value into their products to make a decent profit and it works well for the consumers.
Compare that with what the most dominant software maker does to make $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$...... profit. Taking the example of one of their major products MS Office, how much can the development cost be at the most? Significant amount of labor is obtained at far cheaper rates by outsourcing to developing countries. Many companies developing software products of comparable complexity (functionality-wise) employ less than 100 people.
To sell each copy of the software, the additional expenditure will be that of making a CD, 10 cents at the most while mass producing. They sell hundreds of millions of copies. Earning a decent profit similar to what manufacturers of traditional products make calls for a retail price of less than $10. They sell it at
$299-$399. They call it success of their company. I call it sheer exploitation of the lack of vigilance of law makers to adapt laws to cover new kinds of products like software. The mountain of cash collected in this manner and the huge leverage from the widely deployed windows operating system are
time and again systematically employed to spread the business into other fields and the 'success' used
to be automatic because, several existing players can be bought and the market can be monopolized (or monotonized by stifling competition). It has been
going for far too long now. It is not going to work any longer. I think people are getting sick of the quality that they get from half-baked products bought (sometimes forced upon due to lack of choice) at $$$ .

Good luck
Arun

system a

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