Steve Ballmer's bogus threat

[der.hans]

Am 06. Mar, 2002 schwätzte George Toft so:

> Do you have a reference for this claim?  Here's my math:
> Number of copies of Windows sold by Microsoft by 1999: 200 million
> Average licensing cost disclosed during Anti-Trust trial: $50 (about)
> Total revenue: $1 Billion.

Didn't they blow $1 billion on the ad blitz for w95 or w98? That was just
the grand opening of the thing and doesn't include long-term advertising.
Granted their advertising other stuff at the same time, but that ain't a
small chunk of change, even for m$. They spend way more on marketing and
sales than they do on engineering. Otherwise they might start making a
decent product.

Think about that. $1 billion. For that at $100,000 salaries figuring it
takes double the salary to actually pay for an employee I'd have 5,000
engineers for a year. There's also equip costs, rent, etc., so let's say
operating expenses and management costs half my wad, that's still 2,500
engineers for a year. I bet we could write a better OS with that many people
within a year. Stretch it and I'd easily be able to do 1,000 engineers for
two years. I'm certain it could be done in that time.

Granted, since I'm not allowing for sales and marketing, the business would
fail like iridium did. The difference being that *we'd* be writing Free
Software and we'd all get to keep it after the cash was gone ;-).

There's the business plan. Now we just find someone to give us a billion
dollars :).

ciao,

der.hans
-- 
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