#4: If you are referring to Bill Gates giving away money: Bill Gates is a person. Microsoft is a company. Bill Gates owns part of Microsoft. Bill Gates is the chairman of Microsoft. Bill Gates is not Microsoft, and Microsoft is not Bill Gates. If one goes to McDonalds and buys a cheeseburger, the other does not pay for it, feel less hungry, etc (you figure out which one went to the resurant, and which did not). When Bill Gates bought his house, Microsoft did not pay for it.
They are two seperate and different entities. If Bill Gates wishes to give away some of his money, it in no way affects Microsoft.
It appears you have been brainwashed by the anti-Microsoft crowd. If Microsoft releases a product that people don't understand, but want to bash anyway, it was not necessarily Bill Gates that had the idea. If Microsoft releases a product with a bug, no matter how small, it was not Bill Gates that wrote the code with the bug in it. If Microsoft releases a product and you do not like the price, no matter how high or low (Windows price too high, IE price too low, so everyone bitches), it is not Bill Gates that decided the price. And if Bill Gates wishes to spend $100 million to buy Pez, it is none of your damn buisness.
If you are referring to Microsoft making an investment: Microsoft is a business, they need to continue growing, otherwise they no longer are a business and go bankrupt. Microsoft, if they choose, could fire all their employees, sell off all their ownings, and drop the price of Windows to $5 a copy. There may be thousands more copies sold, but eventually, there would be no new products sold, and would go out of business. Do you realize that if they took that $400M, and used to reduce the price of Windows, for all the copies they have sold, that would decrease the price by less than $1? This is not something that Microsoft does, but many comanies, both Software related and unrelated. IBM puts money into investments, Oracle, Dell, etc. etc. etc. About the only company that has a non existant R&D and makes relativly few investments is Sun, and look where they are. This also goes beyond Microsoft, I am currently shopping for a BMW. Should I yell and complain that the price was too high, and they should not spend money on the yet to be released X3? I could coose to either not buy one, or steal one, just like you can with Windows. Stealing a copy of Windows is a lot easier than stealing a BMW, but just like stealing a BMW, the price of Windows is not enough to justify stealing. Or I could choose to buy something else, I could buy a KIA, just like you could buy Linux. But, then again, you get what you paid for...
This post was edited by SoylentGreen on Tuesday, November 12, 2002 at 12:26.
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