Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> Your expense = my revenue
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
>| I was browsing somebody's third hand list of 25 bad things about
>| vista compared to Linux...
>|
>| [...]
>|
>| On the personal level I know a CIO who got his company to buy tens
>| of thousands of machines from Dell mainly because he admires both
>| Bill Gates and Michael Dell for having made so much money and, in
>| fact, brags about how much he's made holding shares in their companies.
>|
>| [...]
>|
>| Look at this from an American national economic perspective and
>| you get an interesting question: would American GDP rise if
>| customers got the same computing benefits for fewer dollars?
>| -i.e. if Microsoft's desktop monopoly ended and their American
>| pricing fell?
> `----
>
> http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=803
Owning shares in a company and then buying from it does make some kind
of sense, but really, buying shares is like buying anything else,
the decisions need to be made from a rational economic perspective,
not from an irrational "I admire x, y or z" viewpoint, as someone you
admire can just as easily make a mistake as someone you do not.
There are exceptions to this rule, I know, but really they're more
around purchases which are known to be irrational in the first place,
for example, buying shares in your favourite football team, say.
Where the US is likely to lose out as the Microsoft monopoly crumbles is
that the money which was pouring in to the US will be doing so no
longer. Of course, much of that could well be replaced by companies
like Red Hat, IBM, HP and others offering support services. As far as
the US national economy is concerned, the amount of wealth in it is
ulikely to change all that much, so it will be more about where it is
distributed to than anything else. If it is distributed to people and
organisations who can make more from it than Microsoft was doing, then
the GDP will rise.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
| Cola faq: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/ |
| Cola trolls: http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/ |
|
|
