thoughts on esr

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

That was one I had not thought about. All publicly traded companies are 
required to undergo an annual audit by an accredited accounting firm. 
One of the things they look at is compliance with accepted accounting 
standards. I would suspect that if the FASB changes the accounting 
procedure for a major item like stock options that they will grandfather 
the current practice. I think that many things that Eric points our WRT 
Microsoft are true, but I would disagree on a few points. 
First, point of agreement is on whitebox shipments. With the price of 
PCs falling rapidly (eg. look at Ipaq, Imagic, etc). For the most part, most 
people don't really care what software they have as long as it is easy to 
use and compatible. Linux is not quite there yet, but we are very rapidly 
approaching this. 

A point of disagreement is with corporations. There are many reasons a 
large company will standardize on one vendor. The office suites and 
email are a big part of it, but many companies have their own 
applications. Many of these applications are written in Visual Basic or 
Visual C++. Converting applications systems written for Windows to 
other platforms is usually very painful. From past experience in 
mainframes it becomes very expensive. It becomes more important for us 
in the Linux community to try to get more mainstream applications on 
Linux. We have the office suites and email. We lack things like 
accounting packages. These all will come in time. 

Competition is good. The top management at Microsoft is composed of 
some very intelligent shrewd business people. I think you might see 
Microsoft make some interesting and surprising changes in the next 3 or 
4 years.  
On 20 Apr 2000, at 6:16, Ken Gosier wrote:

> Also: Did the point about Microsoft having to charge their
> stock options against revenues seem a little less than
> convincing to anyone else? If this goes through, then

Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org
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