As far as making money in stocks, it’s often good to buy boring companies with a razor blade: ADP, Visa, Wells Fargo, etc

Not as exciting as the thrill of 24 to 88 a share, nor as death defying as 88 to 11.

No matter how great the next camera, how many have one that is good enough? Might be especially true for their age group of buyers.

Sure. That approach to product obsolescence has helped MSFT make money. Indeed, it has appeared that the long, grim history of security problems were not a bug but a feature — a reason to get users to buy the newest version and drop support for the old version.

What I am missing is the claim that how introducing a new product that “cannibalizes” an old product is so easily a serious strategic error.

For me, I got a copy of Office 2003 really cheap as a part of the Microsoft program “Hands on Training”. At times there were patches and security updates. I use Office a little occasionally and don’t like it. For security, I’m sure never to let Office read a file from an untrusted source.

Since Office 2003 is software, it doesn’t wear out and is still as good as it was 13 years ago which, for anything like Office, is fine with me.

My main word whacking is via D. Knuth’t TeX, and it has essentially no bugs or security problems at all and is the unchallenged international standard for high quality word processing in all fields with a lot of math and easily presents math with quality fully up to the best of traditional math-science typesetting, e.g., as by the American Mathematical Society. I could use some darker fonts and some better Adobe fonts for PDF versions. I understand that such fonts exist, but for now I’m just staying with the installation I have.

I can’t stand to write software in a spreadsheet — I have several alternatives that work much better. E.g., for the attached graph, generating the data with a Excel spreadsheet was a disaster — got a huge spreadsheet file that ran far too slowly. So, I just wrote a little code, generated, the data right away, easily, and had Excel read the data, graph it, put the graph on the system clipboard, and have PhotoDraw convert it to a PNG file as displayed.

One issue I do see: If I had a lot of files of input for Office, e.g., files with extension DOC or RTF for Word and got a new version of Word that replaced my old version, then maybe some of my old files, that at long effort I finally got to look like I wanted, would no longer look like they did or might not even work at all. Bummer.

So, I’d need a way to run both versions of Word, and likely getting that to work would be mud wrestling with undocumented prerequisites.

That is, a big company like Microsoft tends to want to stay with some politically correct fiction that, of course, everyone wants only the latest and greatest version of our software so that installing the latest version replaces the older version. Huge bummer. No serious production computer shop takes that attitude; instead they at least want to run the new version off-line on their workload until they are thoroughly convinced that there are no new bugs; one problem along those lines and the CIO’s daughter drops out of college, and her dad gets a new career direction.

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It’s just like the Texas Two Step.

MS Word 2013 is introduced while MS Word 2007 is shitcanned.

MS announces, “We will no longer support MS Word 2007,” and the lemmings line up for the bungy chord ride without the bungy chord?

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.

CEOs of venture backed companies should study the GoPro story. Learn from it.

http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/the-headaches-of-catching-your-dream-gopro/

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com