So you'd rather be using an inferior OS that has no competition and costs $400? Either that or you have a lot of MSFT stock.
The market will take care of itself. Windows is severely overpriced, and at least the low end PC market will most likely be taken over by Linux in the near future. An average OEM Windows license costs $40 I believe. That $40 (or less) may be the entire profit margin in a $200 PC. Microsoft's free ride on OEMs is finally coming to an end.
For the record I use all of the Big Three: Windows, Linux (Ubuntu), and Mac. My personal opinion is that Mac OS X beats the other two hands down as a consumer desktop OS.
Weak dollar is a good thing if you're in the US and making a product or service that people abroad would buy. It's cheaper for them, hence they'll be more likely to buy and will buy more of it. On the other hand if you're in Europe, Australia, or even Canada and you plan to rely a lot on US sales then you may want to pick something different. Other than that I don't see anything significant to worry about.
This is only an issue for women. Risk of problems with pregnancy (and birth defects) goes up significantly for women as they get older (best time to have kids for women is in their 20's). The male reproductive system is much, much simpler though and I don't think age is a factor for men at all. Of course as you age you'd have to find someone increasingly younger than you to carry a child. That would be the only problem.
On the other hand some men would not consider that to be a problem at all (assuming you can find a mate). And if you're a 40 yearold millionaire you shouldn't have a problem finding a 20-something to have a kid with. :-)
I'm really on the fence about this because both arguments have truth to them. If you look at many successful companies, they were often founded by two people. However you'll also find that usually one of the founders leaves eventually (usually after a short while compared to overall lifetime of the company), and the other stays to run the company.
I can give a whole bunch of examples. Apple: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Microsoft: Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Valve: Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Id Software: John Carmack and John Romero. People split for various reasons, sometimes due to disagreements. Sometimes personal reasons or change of interests. In the end most companies seem to end up being run by one person whether or not they were founded by more than one.
There are also successful companies that were founded by one person, like Dell and Amazon. So to me it seems that statistically speaking eventually you'll split up and one of you will have to leave the company.
Ultimately it seems that the co-founder issue is mostly an issue of initial mutual support. It's tough to go through the early stages on your own, and having someone to share the workload with and get moral support from increases your chances of success. But it can only truly work in the long term if you decide at the beginning that one of you will be the president and have the final word in major decisions. Otherwise it's a recipe for trouble down the road.
Right, and that mutual support can come, in large part, from other employees. One company I worked at, due to the personality mix, was kinda rough, and we were in a tough time funding wize and market wise-- but the office manager, and older german woman with a strong will, took it upon herself to fix things and thru random help, negotiation and general positive attitude really made things a lot better- she was a one woman support organization for a 12 person startup.
Finding great people to be employees is very important, and I'd say more important than finding a co-founder. In a way your co-founder has to embody everything... but each employee can contribute a part to the whole.
Hey, don't forget that Paul Allen left Microsoft with cancer. Once he went into remission, he didn't go back to work, he decided to take care of himself and put his billions to use. Pretty easy decision, IMO.
Woz never wanted to run a company, he just wanted to build stuff. (Shameless plug for Chapter 3 of Jessica's book, Founders at Work).
For every example you cite, there's probably a new story line.
Car makers have a very low profit margin. Toyota has about 7% (and that's very high for cars -- GM has like 1%). Google has about 30% profit margin. There's definitely a lot more money in cars in general (in terms of revenue), but Google's net income for 2006 was $1 billion more than GM, despite GM having about $197 billion more in revenue. Having high revenues doesn't mean you're making a lot in profit, which is what counts.
Though, GM is probably not the best example...it's bleeding cash at the moment, and has even had negative earnings some quarters.
If you want to play the profit game, compare Google's profit to Wal-Mart, Exxon-Mobil, and CitiGroup. We're not even in the same league here. In fact, we're not even in the same order of magnitude!
Again, Google making that list (and having a high market cap) is much more an effect of it's expected growth (and high multiple) than it's actual present value as a company.
Just nitpicking here, but Citigroup turned a loss this past quarter due to mortgage-backed security writedowns. I think Google actually turned a respectable profit.
"The laptops were designed specifically to run Linux programs. If the machines run only Linux, Microsoft will lose an opportunity to expose tens of millions of children worldwide to its Windows system."
Sounds like a great opportunity for desktop Linux. Let's hope they stick with it.
"More than 80 percent of Vista sales were through sales of new PCs, which shows how powerful that franchise continues to be."
Huh? Powerful franchise? People buying new computers without any choice of not getting Windows shows that Vista is very popular? The only reason people are using Vista at all is because it ships with new computers.
The market will take care of itself. Windows is severely overpriced, and at least the low end PC market will most likely be taken over by Linux in the near future. An average OEM Windows license costs $40 I believe. That $40 (or less) may be the entire profit margin in a $200 PC. Microsoft's free ride on OEMs is finally coming to an end.
For the record I use all of the Big Three: Windows, Linux (Ubuntu), and Mac. My personal opinion is that Mac OS X beats the other two hands down as a consumer desktop OS.